The Old Man Murray gaming site (ca 1997-2003) had an interesting metric they developed for reviewing games called "Start to Crate" in which you count how many seconds from the start of the video game until you see a crate. The premise is to show how game developers lack imagination when filling out their game universe and simply resort to filling in the landscape with crates and barrels.
While comedic at first, the idea of a metric about how long until a generic object is inserted into the environment, could just as easily be used by User Experience specialists who need something besides the GUI to point to as concrete evidence of bad design. Also some Gen-X humor included with the article. Enjoy.