The HEART Framework
Choosing the right UX metrics for your product.
What is it?
A framework that can be applied to a specific feature or a whole product to define metrics that measure its user experience.
Why use it?
Measure the quality of user experience, and define the specific metrics to track progress towards goals.
How does it work?
The HEART framework contains five categories to help measure the quality of user experience:
- Happiness: measures of user attitudes, often collected via survey. For example: satisfaction, perceived ease of use, and net-promoter score.
- Engagement: level of user involvement, typically measured via behavioral proxies such as frequency, intensity, or depth of interaction over some time period. Examples might include the number of visits per user per week or the number of photos uploaded per user per day.
- Adoption: new users of a product or feature. For example: the number of accounts created in the last seven days or the percentage of Gmail users who use labels.
- Retention: the rate at which existing users are returning. For example: how many of the active users from a given time period are still present in some later time period? You may be more interested in failure to retain, commonly known as “churn.”
- Task success: this includes traditional behavioral metrics of user experience, such as efficiency (e.g. time to complete a task), effectiveness (e.g. percent of tasks completed), and error rate. This category is most applicable to areas of your product that are very task-focused, such as search or an upload flow.
To measure progress in the above categories, the Goals-Signals-Metrics process is used to set the goals for your product:
- Goals: identify your goals so you can choose metrics that help you measure progress towards those goals.
- Signals: map your goals to lower-level signals. For example, an engagement signal for YouTube might be the number of videos users watch on the site — but an even better one might be the amount of time they spend watching those videos.
- Metrics: once you’ve chosen signals, you can refine those further, into metrics you’ll track over time or use for comparison in an A/B test. In the YouTube engagement example, we might implement “how long users spend watching videos” as “the average number of minutes spent watching videos per user per day.”
Who was it created by?
- Kerry Rodden, Google
- Hilary Hutchinson, Google
- Xin Fu, Google
Who uses it?
[Let us know if you are aware of any uses cases.]
How can I learn more about it?
From the source.
- Medium article:
- Google academic research publication:
Read the book.
[Let us know if you are aware of books about the HEART framework]
Watch a presentation.
[Let us know if you are aware of video presentations about the HEART framework]
Take a course.
- Name: Product Design by Google
- Description: This course, part of Udacity’s Tech Entrepreneur Nanodegree Program, is designed to help you materialize your game-changing idea and transform it into a product that you can build a business around. Product Design blends theory and practice to teach you product validation, UI/UX practices, Google’s Design Sprint and the process for setting and tracking actionable metrics. The HEART framework is also thought as part of this course.
- Price: Free
- Skill Level: Intermediate
- Duration: Approximately 2 months
Attend a workshop.
[Let us know if you are aware of any workshops teaching the HEART framework]
Attend a meetup.
[Let us know if you are aware of meetups discussing the HEART framework]
Resources.
- Animated explanation of the HEART framework from Digital Telepathy:
About this article.
This article is part of a series of articles guiding readers in exploring the many frameworks and methodologies in product management. You can browse all articles here:
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