About Adoption
The Adoption dimension measures how broadly and consistently users engage with each application in your portfolio. It carries the highest weight of any HEART dimension, contributing 30% to the overall HEART Score.
Why use it
An application only delivers value when it is used by the right people, at the right frequency, and over time. Adoption covers all three of those dimensions in a single score.
A low Adoption score can point to several different problems: low license coverage, superficial engagement, or users who engage briefly but do not return. Each pattern has a different cause and a different fix. Adoption gives you the signal; the metric breakdown tells you where to look.A high Adoption score indicates that your deployment has reached its intended users, that they engage actively with the application, and that engagement is sustained over time. This is a clear indicator that the application has become part of how people work.
How is it calculated?
Adoption uses three metrics.
- License utilization is the percentage of licensed users who are active, calculated as active users divided by your expected user count. You set the expected user count in the application settings. If not configured, this metric is excluded and the score is calculated from the remaining two.
- Engaged user rate is the percentage of active users who have at least one engaged session during the scoring period. A session is considered engaged when it lasts at least 60 seconds and includes at least 3 interactions. This metric is automatic and requires no configuration.
- User persistence is the percentage of engaged users who maintain their personal engagement pattern over time. This metric requires at least six weeks of engagement history before it becomes active. It is automatic and requires no configuration.
Data readiness
| Status | Meaning |
| Input needed | More specific information on how good or poor your Adoption Score is, which provides you with a clearer and quicker overview of where your application stands currently, and what steps you can take to improve its overall health |
| Callibrating | Ratio of unique users in the selected date range to expected users |
| Ready | Ratio of the difference between unique users in the selected time range and users from the previous period over users from the previous period |
Note: Engaged user rate and user persistence can reach READY status independently of license utilization. If the expected user count is not set, the Adoption score is still active but excludes license utilization, and weight distributes across the remaining metrics.
Best practices
- Set your expected user count for every application you want to monitor. License utilization is often the first place a deployment problem surfaces and without it, you are missing a significant part of what Adoption can tell you.
- If engaged user rate is high but user persistence is low, users are returning but not building a consistent working pattern. This often points to an onboarding gap (users start, then drift) rather than a product problem.
- If license utilization is low, verify that users have been onboarded and that access is working correctly before assuming disinterest. Deployment problems and experience problems can look the same from the outside.
