Traditional user testing techniques can make it hard to detect how consumers feel about your site and compare that feeling with other sites. In this tutorial, we will introduce the HEART Framework from Google — it's a comprehensive framework for user experience metrics to discover more about your users and their emotions

Introduction

The HEART Framework was designed by Xin Fu, Hilary Hutchinson, and Kerry Rodden, from Google’s research team to determine who uses Google's product and why. This framework is user-centric—it studies context, engagement, and emotions to put users at the center of research to capture their experience in the moment. These metrics can then be used for decision making in the product development process. HEART is an acronym that constitutes five metrics: Happiness, Engagement, Adoption, Retention, and Task Success. Together they paint an image of the overall UX.

Happiness

A big part of the job of a product manager is making sure that any product or service being developed is being targeted at a market large enough to justify the costs of development. As a product manager, you should be able to estimate the size of the market for the products and features that are being considered next. Over the course of this article, we will compare the two most-commonly employed techniques to estimate the size of a market — top-down analysis and bottom-up analysis.

Top-down Analysis

In top-down analysis, you start with the total size of a given industry, devise a number of appropriate filters that reflect the segment of the market being targeted, and then apply those filters to come down to the market that can be addressed by the service or product being developed. This whittled down market is commonly referred to as the Total Addressable Market and is often shortened to TAM. The primary goal while performing top-down analysis is to get a sense of the magnitude of the market opportunity; accuracy of the estimate is...

For a product manager, it’s important to understand the various stages that products go through during their lifecycle. The following four broadly-defined stages constitute the product life-cycle:

1. Introduction
2. Growth
3. Maturity
4. Decline

This article will introduce you to each of these stages as well as examples of products in each to help you better identify them moving forward.

Introduction

The introduction phase of a product’s life-cycle is defined by the following:

• There have only been a few iterations of t...