HEART framework
A framework for choosing what to measure in a digital product (happiness, engagement, adoption, retention and task success), starting from goals rather than available data.
What problem it addresses
Avoids measuring only visits or clicks and connects the numbers to what you actually want to improve.
Components
Happiness
What people feel and think, for example their satisfaction.
Engagement
How much and how often they use the product.
Adoption
How many people start using it.
Retention
How many keep using it afterward.
Task success
Whether they achieve what they set out to do, how fast and with how many errors.
How it works
Goals what the product should achieve.
Signals what behavior or response would show it.
Metrics how to count it to track it over time.
Applications in design
Use it like this
Decide what to measure before launching a change and check afterward whether the experience improved.
Avoid
Always using all five categories; choose the ones that make sense for your product.
Don’t fall for it
Metrics say what happens, not why: combine them with qualitative research.
Connections
Authors and works
- 2010
Kerry Rodden, Hilary Hutchinson and Xin Fu
Proposed the five categories and the goals, signals and metrics process based on their work with product teams at Google.
Sources
Original sources
- Rodden, K., Hutchinson, H., & Fu, X. (2010). Measuring the user experience on a large scale: User-centered metrics for web applications. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’10). ACM. View source: Rodden, K., Hutchinson, H., & Fu, X. (2010)
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