Measure. Measure. Measure. Tracking the impact of a product is crucial if you wish to learn about your product and your customers. I’ve written before about the importance of spending time on defining the right metrics to measure, avoiding the risk of succumbing to data overload. That’s all well and good, but what do you do when the key things to measure aren’t so tangible!? For example, how do you measure customer feelings or opinions (a lot of which you’ll learn about during qualitative research)?

A few years ago, Kerry Rodden – whilst at Google – introduced the HEART framework which aims to solve the problem of measuring less tangible aspects of the products and experiences we create (see Fig. 1 below). The HEART framework consists of two parts:

• The part that measures the quality of the user experience (the HEART framework)
• The part that measures the goals of a project or product (the Goals-Signals-Metrics process)

Fig. 1 – The HEART framework combined with the Goals-Signals-Metrics process – Taken from: https://medium.com/@dhruvghulati/google-s-heart-framework-a-critical-evaluation-a6694421dae

Both parts are very helpful tools to have in one’s product management toolkit as they’ll help you to measure product performance through the lens of the person using your product:

HEART framework

• Happiness – Measure of user attitudes, often collected via surveys or interviews. For example: satisfaction, perceived ease of use, and net promoter score.
• Engagement – Measures the level of user involvement, typically via behavioural proxies such as frequency, intensity, or depth of interaction over some time period. Examples 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, feature or a service. For example: the number of accounts created in the last seven days, the number of people dropping off during the onboarding experience or the percentage of Gmail users who use labels.
• Retention – The rate at which existing users are returning. For example: how many 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 behavioural metrics with respect to 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.

Certainly, the HEART framework isn’t bullet proof (nor does it have to be in my humble opinion). For example, Dhruv Ghulati has written up some valid concerns about how the HEART metrics could easily contradict each other or shouldn’t be taken at face value. I do, however, believe that the HEART framework is a valuable tool for the following reasons and use cases:

• Learning how customers feel about your product.
• Correlating these learnings with actual customer behaviours.
• Does the product help achieve key customer tasks or outcomes? Why (not)?
• What should we focus on? Why? How to best measure?

The HEART framework thus works well in measuring the quality of the user experience, making intangible things such as “happiness” and “engagement” more tangible.

Goals-Signals-Metrics process

The HEART framework goes hand in hand with the Goals-Signals-Metrics process, which measures the specific goals of a product. I came across a great example of the Goals-Signals-Metrics process, by Usabilla. This qualitative user research company applied the HEART framework and the Goals-Signals-Metrics when they launched a 2-step verification future for their users.

Fig. 2 – Usabilla’s application of the HEART framework – Taken from: https://usabilla.com/blog/how-to-prove-the-value-of-your-ux-work/

This example clearly shows how you can take ‘happiness’, a more intangible aspect of Usabilla’s authentication experience, and make it measurable:

• Question: How to measure ‘happiness’ with respect to Usabilla’s authentication experience?
• Goal: The overarching goal here is to ensure that Usabilla’s customers feel satisfied and secure whilst using Usabilla’s product.
• Signals: Positive customer feedback on the feature – through a survey – is a strong signal that Usabilla’s happiness goal is being achieved.
• Metrics: Measuring the percentage of Usabilla customers that feels satisfied and secure after using the new authentication experience.

This Usabilla example of the HEART framework clearly shows the underlying method of taking a fuzzy goal and breaking it down into something which can be measured more objectively.

Main learning point: The HEART framework is a useful tool when it comes to understanding and tracking the customer impact of your product. As with everything that you’re trying to measure, make sure you’re clear about what you’re looking to learn and how to best interpret the data. However, the fact that the HEART framework looks at aspects at ‘happiness’ and ‘engagement’ makes it a useful tool in my book!

Related links for further learning:

1. https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/google-s-heart-framework-for-measuring-ux
2. https://www.dtelepathy.com/ux-metrics/
3. http://www.rodden.org/kerry
4. https://medium.com/uxinthe6ix/how-we-used-the-heart-framework-to-set-the-right-ux-goals-4454df39db94
5. https://library.gv.com/how-to-choose-the-right-ux-metrics-for-your-product-5f46359ab5be
6. https://www.appcues.com/blog/google-improves-user-experience-with-heart-framework
7. https://clevertap.com/blog/google-heart-framework/
8. https://medium.com/@dhruvghulati/google-s-heart-framework-a-critical-evaluation-a6694421dae
9. https://gofishdigital.com/heart-framwork-plan-track-measure-goals-site/
10. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyZzbsL_fsg
11. http://www.jjg.net/elements/
12. https://usabilitygeek.com/combining-heart-framework-with-goals-signals-metrics-process-ux-metrics/