Metrics for UX Designers — HEART
HEART (Happiness, Engagement, Adoption, Retention, Task Success) is a framework created by Kerry Rodden, Hilary Hutchinson and Xin Fu, from Google’s research team, to help measure the quality of the user experience of a product or specific features. To use the framework properly you have to choose one or two categories, inside of HEART acronym, that are the focus of your product or project. With user-centred metrics you are allowed to measure the user experience on a large scale.
Observe users, talk to them, ask them questions, etc. and get rapid feedback is an easy way to measure experience on a small scale, and that’s the common day-by-day job for ux designers.
And looking to the other side, of large scale processes, Google researchers noted that there was a simple framework missing in order to follow rules and patterns looking to find results above the user experience. Furthermore, the framework can be used by small scale projects too, due to the fact that the methodologies are abstract most of times.
Happiness
Measures of user attitudes, feedback and resolutions, collected many times via survey. As an example, how are users handling a change made in the product? Are they satisfied or do they disapprove? As an example, here are some metrics to follow:
- Satisfaction
- Perceived ease of use,
- Net-promoter score
Engagement
Level of user involvement with the product, typically comes from analytics and events triggered by users. A few events to track are:
- Number of visits per user per week
- Number of photos uploaded per user per day
- Number of shares
Adoption
Gaining new users of a product or feature. How many users are using new versions or signing up because of some feature? It’s great metrics to understand how the public reacts to news. In this category you can use these metrics as example:
- Upgrades to the latest version
- New subscriptions created
- Purchases made by new users
Retention
The rate at which existing users are returning. One of the most important characteristics for startups is if the users are returning and using the product again, Maintaining a satisfied user is a tough job. To measure the retention you can use:
- Number of active users remaining present over time
- Renewal rate or failure to retain (churn)
- Repeat purchases
Task Success
Efficiency, effectiveness, and error rate. “Performance counts,” this phrase summarizes the importance of fast interactions and feedback of the product with the user. Above are some ideas of performance metrics:
- Search result success
- Time to upload a photo
- Profile creation complete
After understanding the categories to focus on, it’s time to pick the metrics to track and implement, in other words, you have to clarify and follow your goals. The Goals Signals Metrics process is one way to facilitate the identification of meaningful metrics that should lead to a natural prioritization of the various metrics, and that we will talk about in the next article.
In conclusion, the HEART framework is a simple, understandable and useful way that helps to have metrics that reflect the quality of the user experience, and that map to your main goals. As a big or small scale process, metrics are friends and can help the whole team to watch what’s really important.