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

User input is essential to make a great product. But you can’t just sit down and have a conversation. Interviews have a specific purpose: to get accurate information.

Your goal is to get answers to the five W’s: who, what, when, where, and why? Deepen your understanding and fill in all the gaps in your knowledge.

You’ll want to follow the four best practices to make sure you get that information.

Best practices

1. Don’t talk about your solution: The point of the interview is not to sell your solution to the customer. The point is to understand your customer. So focus on them and their needs.
2. Don’t bring up your own opinions: You don’t want to influence them in any way, or else the results will be useless. Just ask questions and let them talk. Don’t wo...

What are metrics?

Feedback loops are a profoundly effective way of augmenting individual behavior — dynamic speed displays have fared far better at getting drivers to slow down than any previous attempts such as speeding fines and traffic cops setting up speed-traps. The difference between the two is that the former features a feedback loop that provides feedback in almost real-time and gives the user a chance to modify their behavior while the latter offers no such provision.

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...