Re-thinking Framework Heart
Note: this article will be more interesting if you already know what Framework Heart is. You can check here an article that I think is cool, in case you want to take a look first, after all to reflect on something, first we have to know what it is about … :P
The first time I saw something about Framework Heart was in 2016. I was preparing the teaching plan and classes for a webdesign course that had a “UX Design” module. I was looking for user experience validation techniques, besides usability tests. I had been working as a UX designer for a while, and although the terms KPIs and OKRs were already part of my working vocabulary, I had never seen a way to match any UX indicators logic. For that reason this framework interested me immediately.
At that time, I read a publication here on Medium (which, I am almost sure, was this one by Fabricio Teixeira). I confess that, at first glance, I wasn’t able to assimilate very well how it worked. I was having difficulty generalizing its implementation. In addition, I got trouble understanding how the framework proposes that the first step was defining goals (before the indicators and metrics), but many posts that I read presented which metrics “should” appear in each of the table lines. Shouldn’t metrics be identified or created after it is clear what the goals were? How can we already know which metrics should appear? In my head it didn’t seem to make sense, and those examples described in Medium’s posts seemed to only work there.
Fortunately after couple years, the experience that only time and the work routine can offer, made those columns of goals, signs and metrics resignify. To resignify these columns and rows, we need to understand exactly what they represent. And the first step for this is to understand the historical context in which this method was proposed.
Reinterpreting Framework Heart proposal
In 2010, when the original Framework Heart paper was published by a Google Ventures team, the social-technological context was very different. We were in the first steps of “data revolution”. The iPhone had been launched a few years earlier, and people’s interaction with technology was becoming more and more personal. While before a house had one computer that was used by several people, in the other hand, smartphones were for individual use. The arrival of 3G technology, and later 4G, it made the use of social networks, streaming, and internet access in general, increase dramatically. This made the desktop arrive in 2021 representing less than 50% of internet usage. Not to mention the apps revolution, which made people change the way they use services that for decades (or even centuries), remained practically the same. Some obvious examples are transportation services (taxi, train, bus and flight tickets), restaurants, hotels and banks.
I wrote this last decade historical recap, to point how different was the technological environment when the original paper was written, thus deserves some updates. Don’t get me wrong, the paper is great, and you can download the full version clicking here. Nevertheless, the Framework Heart was conceived as an alternative to metrics such as PULSE (Page views, Uptime, Latency, Seven-day active users and Earnings) according to the authors. It is a method that combines large-scale attitudinal and behavioral data in order to evaluate user experience. Rather than replace, this framework should exist complement other methods, like usability testing and analysis. (Rodden et al, 2010). However, the authors imply that this technique eas conceived to be used in digital products context.
2020s Framework Heart
The word Heart is an acronym for Happiness, Engagement, Adoption, Retention and Task Success. In summary, we can say that each of these words represents a group of metrics, relating each concept with the user experience.
- “Happiness” shows how some indicators and metrics relates to subjective aspects of the experience. Due to this type of indicator qualitative perspective, they can be measured and monitored by recurring research, artificial intelligence interpretation of comments on social networks or evaluation in the app store, in addition to NPS and similar techniques.
- “Task success” is more about usability and system performance. This set also covers from usage flows and number of clicks to time needed to task completion analysis.
The “Happiness” and “Task Success” meaning in this new interpretation, still similar to the original of the authors. However, an important difference that must be observed is how artificial intelligence resources are enabling designers understand metrics that in the past would have been considered vanity metrics. For example, the possibility of evaluating among thousands of customer comments on social networks, how many of them represent positive or negative messages, and even what the subject of the message in question is. There are already companies on the market that provide artificial intelligence for comments interpretation and analysis service, in order to know what they are saying about you on social networks . In addition, “Task Success” essentially start to look beyond technical aspects, and try to understand the flow of use by the user, as an important factor to be considered in this group.
The “Engagement”, “Adoption” and “Retention” sets are probably where my reinterpretation more differentiates from the original idea of the paper. I adapted these three groups interpretation to cover the “classical stages” of the user’s journey, or to the marketing sales funnel. I will not go into the trap of “UX vs CX” subject (at least, not for now…), but I agree with basically this whole NNGroup video.
This is one of the main reasons why this new perspective is so interesting. It helps to apply the framework for a greater diversity of teams. Hence, we should read these three groups of indicators as follows:
- “Engagement” will group everything related to the pre-sale or pre-adoption stages (for digital products or services). It can be from the quantity or effectiveness of communications, pre-sales service, or the steps to attract new customers and leads.
- “Adoption” is “the moment” of purchase, hiring, enrollment, subscription, etc. It is one of the most important moments of truth, where the client is theoretically more receptive to information. In addition to new users, cross and up selling metrics can be considered, besides a deeper evaluation of the conversion funnel.
- “Retention” is all about post-sale. Relating to the marketing funnel, we are talking about the stages of retention, loyalty and advocacy. Considering the user journey, we are talking about customers who come back to buy, renew subscriptions, in addition to churn and retention efficiency.
Nice! But, and now what?
If you think that this reinterpretation makes sense, you should try to apply it within the context of your company. After all, the Framework Heart is nothing else than a large table that gather the main UX indicators of qualitative aspects (happiness), technical aspects (task success) and the entire user journey (engagement, adoption and retention). If you are curious how you can apply this method in this way, in the next few days I want to post an article explaining each step of this process. ;)
Thank you if you’ve read this far, and if you have any comments on the topic, I’ll be very happy to talk to you!
Cheers
