How Google’s HEART Framework Is Helpful for Measuring User Experience and UX?

If you are struggling to adopt a key and useful metrics in terms of user experience team – you should consider Google’s HEART framework.

The idea behind this is a simple one; it lets you deliver a series of user-centric metrics. It allows you to properly measure the user experience on a very large scale. And these metrics could be used for decision making, which is required in the product development process.

What is Heart Framework?

Measuring user experience on a small scale is comparatively easy. That’s what user experience designers do regularly. It helps you in observing users, talking to them, asking questions, etc. to get a rapid feedback and suggestion on this.

So what does the research team from Google noted was that while small scale frameworks were common place measuring the experience on a large scale via automated means had no framework in place. Thus the Heart Framework is specifically targeted at that kind of measurement. However, the principles are equally useful at a smaller scale. And processes and methodologies are used to derive the measurements at a comparatively smaller scale and are expected to be substantially different.

The Heart Metrics

There are basically five metrics that are used in the Google’s HEART framework:

• • Happiness

• • Engagement

• • Adoption

• • Retention

• Task Success

The research team notes that not all the projects require metrics and those metrics should always be chosen (in combination), which is entirely based on the results required from the metrics. Engagement thus, has a little relevance while exploring such kind of systems.

Happiness

However, you all might think this is a measure of your attitude or satisfaction level. And you’re most likely to properly record satisfaction on a larger scale projects through some kind of user survey.
With all these metrics, a snapshot in time is not enough to be based on decision making. Long-term and enduring observation of metrics provides better and crucial data for decision making.

Engagement

Engagement is a correct measurement of how much a user could easily interact with a product. We’ve already discussed that it could be a poor metric for enterprises because there’s no specific usage patterns.
Real measurements in this domain might properly examine the usage regularity and the intensity of use or the overall level of engagement over a period of time. However, the right metrics and stats may vary from product to product.

Adoption

Adoption is calculated on the basis of total number of new users started using it over a certain time frame. It’s the proper measurement of how successful you are captivating new businesses. However, it is argued between the measure of user experience and customer experience.

Retention

Retention is keeping your existing users for certain amount of time. However, there is not certain time limit for this. It could be any indefinite amount of time. Few days, few weeks, few months, a quarter, or a year, every interval is reasonable interval depending on the ROI.

Task Success

The final metric “task success” could be understood as the more delicate components. You might want to examine the time spent on any given task. You should look for – How to improve the process? Or check for the percentage of successful completions of a specific task.

Experts recommend remote usability testing and benchmark studies are for properly measuring these metrics on a larger scale.

Summary
The Google’s HEART framework is a flawless and efficient framework because it’s simple and easy to understand. It makes the communication easy, efficient and flawless. However, the framework is designed for big projects; but nothing could stop it from being implemented on smaller projects either – it’s just that the medium and methods used for data collection may vary. Hope you like the article and find it interesting and useful.