Hotjar

Hotjar is the marketer's and designer's “eyes”. It lets you see a website through its users' eyes. Instead of reading tables and numbers you watch video recordings of real clicks, mouse movements and scrolling. The tool is key for conversion rate optimisation (CRO) and improving user experience (UX).

Its main features include:

1. Heatmaps: a colour display of the places people click most, where they look and how far down the page they scroll.
2. Recordings: anonymised video recordings of individual visitors' sessions. You see where a user got stuck or why they abandoned the shopping basket.
3. Surveys & feedback: the option to add short questionnaires or widgets to the site to collect immediate feedback (“Did you find what you were looking for?”).

Advantages

• You uncover errors on the site, broken buttons or confusing elements that stop users completing a purchase.
• Based on real data you can move important elements (such as CTA buttons) to where people actually look.
• Hotjar shows exactly how your site displays and behaves on different types of smartphone.
• Instead of guesswork and gut feeling you hold visual evidence that supports the case for investing in a redesign or site changes.

Disadvantages

• Like any external script, Hotjar can slightly (though usually negligibly) affect page loading time.
• The free version has a limited number of recordings and heatmap views per day, which may not be enough for high-traffic sites.
• Interpreting the data takes time.

Practical example

Imagine a company running a booking system for a dental clinic. They notice that many people start filling in the form but nobody submits it. Google Analytics tells them only the bounce rate. After deploying Hotjar the company sees that on mobile devices a chat bubble covers the “Send” button. Users cannot click it, get annoyed and leave. After simply moving the button a few pixels higher, the number of bookings rises.