The HEART framework
Kerry Rodden, a UX researcher at YouTube, wrote one of the best posts I’ve seen recently on managing product with meaningful metrics.
Her team has developed something she calls “the HEART framework.” It has similarities to Dave McClure’s Startup Metrics for Pirates, but it goes a level deeper to break out how one arrives at a given metric: first set Goals, then look for Signals you can measure, then develop Metrics based on those Signals.
She visualizes the approach in the following 5x3:
If you manage product, or work with people who do, I recommend reading the entire article and filling out your own matrix. Here’s an excerpt defining each term of HEART:
- 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.
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