Measuring UX With Google HEART Framework

The HEART framework simplifies the customer experience into five simple factors; Happiness, Engagement, Adoption, Retention, and Task Success.

Let us explore these five crucial factors that help us gain a deeper understanding of our customers’ experiences.

The first metric in the HEART framework measures how users feel about your service or product. 

User happiness is typically measured through net promoter scores, customer satisfaction surveys, and perceived ease of usage through ratings and reviews.

Engagement focuses on the degree of user interactions with the product by measuring usage depth, frequency, and intensity. 

For instance, the number of times a user uses a product or service per week. This metric varies between products as some have a higher level of customer interaction than others.

This factor measures the number of new users using a product or service. Some standard metrics, such as feature adoption, download, and registration rates, help determine customer adoption. 

For instance, adoption could point to customers who create an account with your website or signup for your service for the first time. 

It understands how many active customers use the product or service repeatedly. These metrics focus on gauging customer churn and help identify if customers are facing any challenges. 

However, the nature and goals of the unique product help ascertain what counts as retention. For instance, when users complete an essential task in some products, it is considered a count of a retained customer. 

In other products, just a repeated website visitor itself is regarded as an active customer. The time frames for measuring retention also vary from product to product, where in some cases, it could be a week-on-week basis, and in some cases, it could be a month or longer.

When products are task-focused, it is crucial to understand how easily customers can achieve them. 

Task success uses behavioral user experience metrics to measure users’ time spent and completion percentage on any specific task. 

In some instances, problems in the product, such as redundancies and complexities that hinder users, can be identified by increased time spent on a task or a higher percentage of task failures. This stage is crucial because it helps incredibly in increasing customer retention. 

The best way to achieve this is by selecting the right metrics tailored for your unique product or project. 

Employing the HEART framework does not instantly translate to product success. To help you achieve the best outcomes possible, we have compiled a few essential considerations when implementing the HEART framework for your product. They are:

The HEART framework works best when all project team members are presented with a fixed set of goals and a deep understanding of what they are trying to achieve for the unique project demands. 

Some projects may require a priority placed on keeping existing users engaged, while others may require acquiring new customers. 

Either way, when the team is clear from the start about its objectives, the framework is more likely to succeed. A good rule is not to overwhelm teams with too many goals and restrict them to three to four realistic ones. 

A more significant number of goals may prove challenging when focusing on all five metrics of the HEART framework, so choose them wisely for optimal success.

Success isn’t a fixed point that is easy to reach, but rather a pathway with different actions along the way that ultimately leads to it. It would definitely help if you mapped all your goals so that they can potentially lead to the success you hope to achieve. 

You must then figure out how to identify the success or failures of your goals through signals from your customer behavior and attitude. 

This analysis could mean gauging customers’ feelings, perceptions, or sentiments to ascertain whether the achievement of the goals has led to reaching the defined success point. 

Defining your success signals specific to the goals, whereby they move only when either success or failure occurs and not by any inapplicable circumstance, is a good practice. 

An increased task abandonment rate is an easy and effective signaling failure to achieve goals.

Now that you have defined the direction of the success you wish to achieve, you need to employ dashboards with accurate and trackable metrics that can aptly help you monitor your progress in real-time. 

These metrics vary from the different stages of the HEART framework and entirely depend on your product and what it needs. 

For instance, a higher number of positive ratings or a high net promoter score are realistic trackable metrics that can help you gauge the happiness of your users. 

Likewise, customer churn is an excellent metric for retention, while download rates are a great measure of adoption. 

Finding the right metric is crucial to the success of the HEART Framework, so place deep consideration while deciding. It is worth remembering that percentages, averages, and ratios are excellent means of deriving actionable insights to drive product success further.

Check out How to track design metrics?

You can quickly adapt Google’s HEART framework for your products using our Cubyts template. 

Much like our design sprint and double diamond template, we spent a lot of time and effort to provide you with the best possible module that lets you measure design impact based on the Google HEART framework, assisting you in providing the best UX while you scale. 

Sign up and start using our state-of-the-art platform to catch a glimpse of what Cubyts platform can do for your business.