Baseline experience testing gives you a qualitative baseline of how usable your functional product or service offering is for users and helps identify areas that need design improvements. Representative users are given realistic tasks to accomplish while a study moderator observes and identifies usability problems. A baseline experience test, along with a usability inspection such as a heuristic review, is a good way to introduce usability in your organization.
Usability performance testing focuses on usability benchmark metrics for a product, including time on task, error rates, completion rates, abandonment rates, user satisfaction scores, and others. While a baseline experience test also includes some performance metrics, a usability performance test focuses on quantitative measures and can be replicated to quantify design improvements between development builds or releases, performance against competitive products, or to assess more than one potential design in "A/B" testing.
