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HEART and Goals—Signals—Metrics is a popular methodology developed by Google aiming to help teams measure and improve user experience.
In this article, we’re going to discuss the framework, how to use it for team brainstorming, and prioritizing better UX decisions.
HEART is an acronym for Happiness, Engagement, Adoption, Retention, and Task Success. These are categories that help to define user-centered metrics for product goals achievements.
Happiness covers attitudinal subjective metrics to define users’ overall satisfaction. This includes visual appeal, ease of use, or willingness to share or recommend the product.
Question: How do users feel about your product?
Examples: user surveys, NPS responses.
Engagement comprises metrics to define the level of user involvement with the product—frequency, intensity, and depth.
Question: How often and how extensively do people use the product?
Examples: average session duration, average session frequency.
Adoption focuses on metrics that track the numbers of new users signed up and started using the product during a certain period of time.
Question: How many new users have registered and engaged with the product during the last seven days/month?
Examples: registration rate, download rate
Retention focuses on metrics that help to understand the rate of users returning to your product over longer periods of time.
Question: What percentage of users are returning to the product after 3/6/12 months?
Examples: churn rate, subscription renewal rate
Task Success includes metrics showing that users can complete their tasks and achieve their goals successfully.
Question: Can users perform the necessary actions efficiently and effectively?
Examples: error rate, task duration.
Goals—Signals—Metrics is a process to help brainstorm what your team is trying to achieve by shipping new features or designs. You should define together your product goals and how you can track them and measure progress. Frameworks like HEART, AARRR, WSJF, or others help by prompting articulation of goals. Using frameworks doesn’t require using all their criteria. You can pick a few from different and combine them into one uniquely yours. Don’t try to fit criteria that don’t resonate with your product.
The key step is to articulate your goals. Together with the team, ask yourselves: ‘What is that you want to achieve?’ It’s your broad objective, like what you want your users to experience or accomplish or your business to achieve. Write down everything important to users and business but remember that you can’t work towards all of them at once. Choose 2-4 goals to focus on during the next time period, like quarter or sprint.
Looking at framework metrics will help to stimulate group discussion and produce ideas. Below you can see our examples with criteria from HEART, AARRR, DHM, WSJF, and others.
The next question on the agenda is ‘What signals will indicate that you’re meeting the goal?’ Decide what actions, behaviors, or events can say whether you’re making progress towards your goals, stagnating, or deteriorating. Try to find something specific, something that will change only because of the goal’s progress and not other unrelated reasons. For example, ‘users spending more time in the app’ may mean that you’re improving the Engagement, but it may also say that the app works slowly and users waste a lot of time waiting. Don’t forget you can also consider failures as signals—they can be easier to track, and they’re sometimes more informative.
The last step is to translate the signals you’ve chosen into metrics that you can collect and track on the dashboard. Think, ‘How can we transform the signals into quantifiable data?’ Try to use average ratios or percentages as raw counts depend on the total number of users and may not be useful or indicative. Don’t forget to make notes of the deployed changes so that you clearly see what has caused a spike or a downfall of the metrics. In time you may see insightful trends about metrics’ co-dependencies, for example, if you’re improving Engagement, Retention also shows better results, or enhanced Task Success causes lower Happiness.
Prioritization by the metrics you consider important is vital because while estimating each idea by each criterion, you make it easier to:
The first thing you should do is to add negative factors that must be considered for improved ROI.
For example, human resources are always limited and cost a lot, so you should definitely make sure you get the most out of the person-hours. Add Effort as an evaluation criterion and ask people who’ll do the job to estimate how much time the implementation will require.
You may also need to consider some other extra costs or risks.
As we’ve already mentioned, you shouldn’t try to take into account everything that’s valuable to your product at once. Yet your backlog is full of ideas influencing different goals, and priorities can sometimes change suddenly. For us, there are two ways to estimate all the factors but still be able to devote the team's attention and energy to what’s critical right now and tune out the rest.
Applying weights to estimation criteria allows you to control which of them are significant at the moment. Weights are easy to adjust thus you can quickly change what’s on your priority list without re-evaluation.
Criteria filters allow you to switch the criteria on/off and recalculate the priority matrix quadrants in a few clicks. The matrix is also great for visualizing how easily you’ll get the value thanks to the Effort axis.
The better you describe what each criterion means and what exactly you’re expecting an idea to impact, the easier you’ll make the estimation process. Here you can describe the goals more fully with all the significant details. You can put them down in the form of bullet points or questions.
For example:
Engagement:
Will it make the product more enjoyable for users to engage with it more?
Will it help to increase the time users spend interacting with the product?
Then, decide on the numbers to use for estimation. Fibonacci or Exponential are great sequences to use. We use the 0—5 range. The numbers are not that important as how you explain the gradation meaning.
For example:
0—5 range:
0 — No impact
1 — Minimal
2 — Low
3 — Moderate
4 — Considerable
5 — Very High
The general rule of thumb is to ensure every team member understands the goals, and the score scale is a bit less subjective.
Here is our HEART prioritization template—you can try it out in a few clicks.
Keep your backlog neat and clean and your priorities straight! Oh, and please don't tell us you still use Sheets for prioritization! 😳
Sign Up at Ducalis, connect two-way sync with your task tracker, automate your prioritization process, and create a team evaluation habit.
Combined methods to define metrics reflecting UX quality and project goals.
