HEART Prioritization Framework Template
HEART and Goals—Signals—Metrics is a popular methodology developed by Google aiming to help teams measure and improve user experience.
Criteria
Combined methods to define metrics reflecting UX quality and project goals.
HEART—UX metrics categories.
Happiness—user attitudes collected via survey.
Question: How do users feel about your product?
Examples: user surveys, NPS responses.Engagement—user involvement measured via behavioral proxies.
Question: How often and how extensively do people use the product?
Examples: average session duration, average session frequency.Adoption—the number of new users of a product/feature.
Question: How many new users have registered and engaged with the product during the last seven days/month?
Examples: registration rate, download rateRetention—the rate of existing users’ return.
Question: What percentage of users are returning to the product after 3/6/12 months?
Examples: churn rate, subscription renewal rateTask success—behavioral metrics of UX (efficiency, effectiveness, error rate).
Question: Can users perform the necessary actions efficiently and effectively?
Examples: error rate, task duration.
Goals-Signals-Metrics—process transforming categories into metrics.
Goals—Identify the goals clearly.
Signals—Map goals to lower-level signals sensitive to changes in design.
Metrics—Refine signals into metrics to track or use in an A/B test.
How it works
How to Use Goals—Signals—Metrics Process
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.
Step 1: Goals
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.
Step 2: Signals
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.
Step 3: Metrics
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.
