HEART Framework (post #14)
The HEART framework is a 3x5 with happiness, engagement, adoption, retention and task success going down along the y axis and goals, signals and metrics going across the x axis.
Happiness: how happy is your user?
Engagement: how engaged your user is in the short term?
Adoption: how many users tried your product?
Retention: are your users returning every single month?
Task Success: what’s the most important thing your users should do with your product and are they doing it?
Goals: what do you want to happen?
Signals: what is the actual thing that you need to measure in order to know that you’re getting closer to your goal?
Metrics: how do you take the goal and signal and express it as an actual metric over time?
For our business (standardized exam prep), the retention section is tricky. A lot of people come and go in fairly short order because they are studying for a couple of months and then they are done. We did this one for the ASVAB, which was our proof of concept app. We would obviously have to do a different one for potential B2B customers. Here is what our HEART framework looked like:
Let’s go through what we did. For happiness, our goal was that the average user recommends us. This could most easily be documented by looking at app store reviews and ratings. These are very important factors in whether someone gives your app a chance. And it also plays a significant role in receiving a better placement in the app store (our app would be seen sooner). We would evaluate how this was changing month over month. We would also evaluate how daily active users were increasing month over month.
When evaluating engagement, we really did not want longer sessions. We were focused on micro-learning, and the idea behind that is for fairly short learning sessions (less than 15 minutes). However, we did want more sessions per day. So we were keeping track of average number of sessions per day month over month.
In regard to adoption, our goal was to get 10,000 ASVAB downloads per month. We would be tracking the percent of downloads who convert to the premium (paid version) month over month.
For retention we would calculate retained users, which is just calculating the number of people who used the app both last month and this month. This is calculated as a percentage. In full disclosure, this is an important metric in almost all businesses, but in our business it just wasn’t very important due to the number of people who will leave just due to the fact that they took the ASVAB and are moving on with their life.
With task success, our number one metric is getting people to upgrade. That’s how we make money. So we wanted to look very closely at the percentage of users who used all of the free version. That’s a pretty complicated metric, so we settled for those who have used the app for one hour. One hour was about the amount of time that it would take to use up the full free version. We would evaluate this month over month.
The HEART framework showed us that the metrics that were most important to us were app store rating (quantitative) month over month, app store reviews (qualitative) month over month, daily active users month over month, average number of sessions per day month over month, the percent of downloads who convert to the premium (paid version) month over month, the percentage of those who use the app for one hour but do not upgrade month over month, and the percentage of those who do upgrade month over month. While we were tracking all of this, we wanted 10,000 downloads per month. That was our goal.
It should be noted that we also cared a great deal about whether our product was improving results for the end user. That is, were they learning and at what rate? We were measuring that too but it (in my opinion) did not fit into the HEART framework and I will discuss what we measured there in an upcoming post.