HEART Framework Template
Evaluate customer satisfaction and ensure that you are providing real value with the HEART Framework. Measure Happiness, Engagement, Adoption, Retention, and Task Success.
Trusted by 65M+ users and leading companies
About the HEART Framework template
The HEART framework is a UX framework developed by Google. It turns the often-fuzzy idea of user experience into a set of measurable, actionable metrics, helping your product win new users and keep current active users loyal.
What is the HEART framework?
User experience teams often find it challenging to develop useful metrics for success. It’s an even greater challenge for teams at large companies. You can measure user experience at a small scale through user research, surveys, and focus groups. But as your company grows, your customer base gets too large for these methods to always be reasonable.
Google developed the HEART framework to tackle the problem of quantifying user experience. The HEART framework is a set of user-centered metrics you can use to measure user experience at any scale — then draw on those metrics repeatedly throughout the product development lifecycle.
What does HEART stand for?
HEART stands for Happiness, Engagement, Adoption, Retention, and Task Success.
Happiness is a subjective measure of attitude or satisfaction. It’s often quantified through user surveys and bolstered via case studies.
Engagement measures how much the user interacts willingly with a product. Depending on the product, it can be measured by your number of active users in a day, week, or month or your net promoter score (NPS).
Adoption is the rate of new users gained in each time period, usually monthly.
Retention measures how long each customer remains an active user before dropping off. Churn, the other side of the coin, measures how many active users go inactive each month.
Task Success is either the average time it takes a user to complete a task in your product or the percentage of tasks users successfully complete.
What are goals, signals, and metrics in HEART?
Goals, signals, and metrics are the core of the HEART process. All five areas of the HEART acronym must be connected to a goal, at least one signal, and at least one metric.
A goal is a statement of what you’d like your product to achieve in that area of HEART. It’s important for goals to be general, not defined by existing metrics. Some examples:
Happiness goal: “We want logging into our product to feel relaxing and supportive.”
Engagement goal: “We want users engaging with our app every day.”
Adoption goal: “We want our user base to grow continuously.”
Retention goal: “We want as little churn as possible.”
Task Success goal: “We want to minimize abandoned tasks across all user segments.”
Next, come up with one or more signals for each goal. Signals are signs you can look for to show you whether you’re on track to achieve your goal. Examples might be:
Happiness signals: Positive feedback from with real users, recommendations, few complaints.
Engagement signals: Large amount of user-generated content, users spending more time in the app, users logging in multiple times per day.
Adoption signals: More downloads, new features adopted quickly, paid features generating more revenue.
Retention signals: More subscription renewals, fewer users going inactive.
Task Success signals: Few abandoned tasks, few complaints about time-to-completion.
Finally, decide on metrics you can use to objectively measure each signal. For example:
Happiness metrics: Number of five-star reviews, NPS.
Engagement metrics: Daily/weekly/monthly active users.
Adoption metrics: New users per day/week/month, revenue from paid users.
Retention metrics: Retention rate, churn rate.
Task Success signals: Tasks completed per user, average completion time.
The HEART framework is not prescriptive. You’re free to come up with whatever goals, signals, and metrics make the most sense for your business and product.
How do you create a HEART model?
Start by selecting the HEART framework template. Then follow these steps:
Decide on your scope. Are you evaluating your whole product, certain features, or just one feature?
Get familiar with the template. The five areas are listed at the top of the table. Goals, signals, and metrics run down the left-hand side.
Fill out goals for each column. Brainstorm or with your team to settle on five goals.
Fill out signals. Signals can be either positive (something you want to see) or negative (something you’re on the right track if you don’t see).
Fill out metrics. Pick metrics you can use to quantify each signal.
Alternately, you might choose to come up with goals, signals, and metrics for each column before moving on to the next one. Either approach works!
Once finished, you can share your framework with your team or anyone else who would benefit from seeing the information by sending them the board link.
When should you use the HEART model?
The HEART model is generally used to measure larger scale projects, but it works for any size project or team. Use it whenever you want to ensure you’re making your customers happy and providing them with real value.
What are UX frameworks?
A UX framework is a set of assumptions and steps a team can use to build a user experience. UX frameworks such as HEART also monitor and refine user reactions to a product once it’s already out in the world.
What is a KPI in UX design?
A KPI, or key performance indicator, is a measurable variable a UX team can use to determine how their user interface is performing with customers. In the HEART framework, it’s called a metric. Examples include monthly active users and time to complete tasks.
What is UX tracking?
UX tracking is the act of using tools to follow how users interact with your product. It encompasses a wide range of technology, including website analytics, click-tracking, and A/B testing apps.
How do you use the HEART framework?
The easiest way is to use this free template. Alternatively, create a table and label one axis with Happiness, Engagement, Adoption, Retention, and Task Success. Label the other axis with Goals, Signals, and Metrics. Then, work with your UX team to fill in each cell.
Get started with this template right now.
Assumption Grid Template
Works best for:
Leadership, Decision Making, Strategic Planning
Someone wise once said that nothing in life is certain. But the waters of the business world? It can seem especially uncertain and unclear. An Assumption Grid can help you navigate those waters and make your decisions confidently. It organizes your business ideas according to the certainty and risk of each — then your team can discuss them and make judgment calls, prioritize, mitigate risk, and overcome uncertainties. That’s why an Assumption Grid is a powerful tool for getting past the decision paralysis that every team occasionally faces.
UML State Machine Diagram Template
Works best for:
Software Development, Mapping, Diagrams
Visualize the workflow of a process and how objects perform actions based on different stimuli. State machine diagrams are valuable for understanding how an object responds to events at the different stages of its life cycle. They are also helpful for visualizing event sequences in a system.
Design Research Template
Works best for:
UX Design, Design Thinking, Desk Research
A design research map is a grid framework showing the relationship between two key intersections in research methodologies: mindset and approach. Design research maps encourage your team or clients to develop new business strategies using generative design thinking. Originally designed by academic Liz Sanders, the framework is meant to resolve confusion or overlap between research and design methods. Whether your team is in problem-solving or problem space definition mode, using a research design template can help you consider the collective value of many unrelated practices.
Affinity Diagram Template
Works best for:
Desk Research, Mapping, Product Management
You can use an affinity diagram to generate, organize, and consolidate information that comes out of a brainstorming session. Whether you’re building a product, working through a complex problem, establishing a process, or piecing apart an issue, an affinity diagram is a useful and simple framework that gives each team member the opportunity to pitch in and share their thoughts. But it’s not just ideal for brainstorms—this is a great template and tool when you need to reach consensus or analyze data such as survey results.
DMAIC Analysis Template
Works best for:
Agile Methodology, Design Thinking, Operations
Processes might not seem like the funnest thing to dive into and examine, but wow can it pay off—a more efficient process can lead to serious cost savings and a better product. That’s what DMAIC analysis does. Developed as part of the Six Sigma initiative, DMAIC is a data-driven quality strategy for streamlining processes and resolving issues. The technique is broken into five fundamental steps that are followed in order: Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control.
Process Map Template
Works best for:
Agile Methodology, Product Management, Mapping
Process mapping allows you to assess, document, and strategize around any plan or approach your team has put in place. It’s a useful tool for eliminating or preventing blockers. Organized by stages, a process map enables your team to divide up a process or system and record deliverables and action items at each stage of the process. By breaking down the objectives, activities and deliverables at any stage of a project, you can gain insight into whether you are on track or effectively working through a problem.