Friction, health, and engagement scores

Why scores exist

Raw counts tell you what happened; they don't tell you whether it was good. The four scores at the top of the Analytics page compress the signals across your project into numbers you can watch week to week.

Each card shows the score, a grade or trend, and the change since the previous period. Hovering the info control on a card shows what it measures.

Friction score

Friction combines support pain, feature gaps, docs gaps, stability, and onboarding blockers.

Higher means more user friction — this is the one score where up is bad. A rising friction score usually means one of five things: more support volume, more unaddressed feature requests, questions your help center doesn't answer, more incidents, or people getting stuck during onboarding. The Score overview panel will tell you which.

Health score

Health reflects uptime, response performance, satisfaction, and delivery velocity.

Higher means a healthier product state. It answers a different question from friction: not are users struggling but is the product and the team behind it holding up. A drop here often shows up before friction rises.

Engagement score

Engagement blends voting activity, survey participation, help-center usage, and feedback volume.

Higher means stronger participation. Low engagement is ambiguous on its own — it can mean people are happy and quiet, or that they've disengaged entirely. Read it next to friction: low engagement with low friction is calm; low engagement with high friction means people have stopped telling you about problems they still have.

Overall score

The overall score is the simple average of friction, health, and engagement, reported on a 100-point scale. It's one summary signal for a status update or a weekly check-in — but because it averages three different things, always open the individual scores before drawing a conclusion.

Grades and trends

Friction and health each carry a letter grade alongside the number. Engagement shows a trend instead — rising, falling, or stable. All four show the change against the previous comparable period, so a 30-day view compares against the 30 days before it.

Digging into a score

The Score overview panel breaks the selected score into its component factors. Use it whenever a number moves and you don't know why — the panel shows which input is responsible instead of leaving you to guess.

Using scores well

• Pick one range and stick to it. Comparing a 7-day reading against last month's 90-day reading tells you nothing.
• Watch the direction, not the absolute value. There is no universally good friction score; there's only better or worse than your own last period.
• When a score moves, open Score overview before reacting. The headline number rarely names the problem.
• Expect scores to move after you ship. A release that adds a large feature usually raises support volume for a week or two before things settle.
• New projects will have thin or missing scores until enough activity accumulates. Give it a few weeks before reading trends into them.