The HEART Framework provides a balanced set of user-centred metrics across five dimensions: Happiness, Engagement, Adoption, Retention, and Task Success. It encourages teams to balance experience quality metrics with business metrics and usage metrics.
When building a balanced scorecard for product health, or when a team is over-indexed on a single metric and missing the full picture.
- HAPPINESS: User satisfaction — NPS, CSAT, perceived ease of use
- ENGAGEMENT: Depth and frequency of usage — sessions per week, features used
- ADOPTION: New users or new feature uptake — % of eligible users using a new feature within 30 days
- RETENTION: Long-term usage — D30, D90 retention rate, monthly active rate
- TASK SUCCESS: Efficiency and accuracy — time to complete, error rate, completion rate
- Select 1-2 metrics per dimension that your team can directly influence and reliably measure
For Discover Weekly: Happiness = post-listen survey rating. Engagement = tracks played through to completion. Adoption = % of eligible users who opened Discover Weekly on release day. Retention = % who return the following Monday. Task Success = % of sessions where at least one track was saved. Five dimensions prevent optimising purely for engagement at the expense of happiness.
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- Trying to measure all five dimensions immediately — pick 2-3 to start and expand over time
- Measuring what is easy to track rather than what actually matters
- Not connecting the metrics to specific product decisions — metrics without actions are just noise
- Measuring the User Experience — Tullis & Albert