User experience teams face difficulties creating metrics for success, especially for teams working at big companies. User experience can be measured on a small scale through user research, surveys, and focus groups. However, when a company gets too large these methods sometimes prove to be not very effective.
Google developed the HEART framework in order to quantify user experience. The HEART framework is a set of user-centered metrics which can be used to measure user experience on any scale. This allows for a more reliable and accurate product development lifecycle.
What does HEART stand for?
HEART stands for Happiness, Engagement, Adoption, Retention, and Task Success.
- Happiness is a measure of how satisfied someone is. It can be quantified through surveys and case studies.
- Engagement is a metric that captures how much a user enjoys using a product. It's usually measured by active users in a day, week, or month, or by net promoter score (NPS).
- Adoption rate is the number of new users gained in a set time period, typically monthly.
- Retention is a metric that measures how long each customer remains active before becoming inactive, while churn measures the number of active users who become inactive in a given month.
- Task success is the average time it takes a user to complete a task in your product or the percentage of tasks users successfully complete.
What are goals, signals, and metrics in HEART?
The HEART process is based on goals, signals, and metrics. All five areas of the HEART acronym must be connected to a goal, at least one signal, and at least one metric.
Your product's goal in the area of HEART should be stated generally, not defined by existing metrics. For example:
- Happiness goal: “We want to feel supportive and relaxing by logging into our product.”
- Engagement goal: “We want users to engage with our product every day.”
- Adoption goal: “We want our user base to keep on growing.”
- Retention goal: “We want as little churn users as possible.”
- Task Success goal: “We want to optimize tasks across all user segments.”
What are some signals that will show you whether you are on track to achieve your goal?
- Happiness signals: Positive outcomes as the feedbacks or recommendations.
- Engagement signals: A lot of user-generated content, time spent in the app, multiple logging in per day.
- Adoption signals: Amount of exports, paid features generating more revenue.
- Retention signals: More subscription renewals, fewer users going inactive.
- Task Success signals: Few abandoned tasks, few complaints about time-to-completion.
Choose some metrics that can measure each signal. For example:
- Happiness metrics: Number of five-star reviews.
- Engagement metrics: Amount of daily/weekly/monthly active users.
- Adoption metrics: Amount of new users per day/week/month, revenue from paid users.
- Retention metrics: Retention rate, churn rate.
- Task Success signals: Tasks completed per user, average completion time.
The HEART framework is not prescriptive. You’re free to come up with whatever goals, signals, and metrics make the most sense for your business and product.
How do you create a HEART model?
Let's start! Select the HEART template and follow the steps below:
- Decide on your scope. What aspect of the product are you evaluating?
- Fill out goals for each column. Collaborate with your team to settle on five goals.
- Fill out signals. Signals can be either positive or negative.
- Fill out metrics. Define metrics you can use to quantify each signal.
You might find it more convenient to come up with goals, signals, and metrics for each column before moving on to the next one. Depends what works better for you!
When you're done filling up the framework, you can share your framitework with the rest of the team or anyone else by sending them a link.
When should you use the HEART model?
The HEART model is a great way to measure customer satisfaction on any size project or team. Use it whenever you want to ensure you're providing your customers with real value and making them happy.
