Create effective content using the HEART metrics framework

What is the purpose of educational content? Why invest in creating a help center or an online course for your product? There are three primary reasons:

• Increase adoption, engagement, and retention
• Reduce support costs
• Build user trust

The HEART framework, developed at Google, breaks down product success into 5 areas: Happiness, Engagement, Adoption, Retention, and Task Success. Here’s how to apply this to educational content and drive better product outcomes.

Happiness: User trust is key. Do you proactively explain product changes to users? Are you transparent? Do you listen to customers and teach them how to be successful, or does your content simply document product features? Monitor Product Csat and Net Promoter Score. Don’t rely on help center CSat because it primarily measures how happy users are with the content, not your product.

Engagement: Create online courses and certifications to build a passionate base of power users who evangelize your product. More tactically, lead with examples in help center articles. You should expect your team to create a content strategy that drives product engagement. Measure effectiveness with Average Session Length, Conversion Rate, and similar metrics.

Adoption: Speak to users in their language, not your product jargon. If your content assumes that new users know (or even want to learn) your product terminology, you’re going to have a hard time driving adoption. Use a metric that measures initial opt-ins; for example, you might use N of Accounts Created for a new SaaS product.

Retention:? Does your content give users a reason to keep using the product? As users become more sophisticated, does your content grow with them, addressing use cases they hadn’t considered? A common metric is churn rate, but use whatever metric captures the nuances of your product.

Task Success: When users can’t complete tasks, they request support. This is expensive. A high Escalation Rate suggests that your help center is not doing its job. But, be sure to also look at Avg Time to Resolution because customers often request support even when the help center has the information they need. In these cases, the support rep can simply reply with an article link and quickly close out the ticket. A high Escalation Rate with a low Average Time to Resolution suggests that the content might be fine, but needs to be more discoverable.

Thoughts? What other ways can education drive better product outcomes?