There’s no excuse for a bad website or app customer experience in 2025. I just lost 10 minutes of my life in an endless loop of login failures on the Virginia Mason payment gateway. The site’s UI is painfully bad, and the password recovery flow is prehistoric.
I eventually skipped that flow and used the “quick pay” solution. It was anything but “quick.” They get so many basic things wrong in the UI, like being friendly with password tools that autofill your information.
I am willing to bet that no C-level leader at Virginia Mason has ever reviewed a metric related to their patient or payment portal. Does anyone at VM know how many fatal errors, login failures, password recovery requests, successful password resets, payment form submit success rates by payment type, etc.?
I am describing a standard set of input metrics that every business with any digital presence should manage because they determine the quality of your customer experience.
It’s the 21st century, folks – every business is a digital business!!
My co-author, Colin Bryar, and I offer extensive advice on this topic. To learn how to instrument your products, processes, and systems to understand, monitor, and improve the customer experience, read our book (Working Backwards) or take our online course to learn more about input metrics.
