With any website, knowing whether it’s working for your user is critical. A website left alone is a lonely website indeed. Because no one is converting!

The good news is there are many tools around to help make sense of how user friendly your website is. In fact, heatmaps is one such tool that will keep you talking about the user experience all day long.

What are heatmaps?

Heatmaps provide the opportunity to gain visual insights into how your users are interacting with your website. You can see where they’re clicking, how far down they’re scrolling and even take a look at how users are moving their mouse on the webpage.

Heatmaps provide valuable insights to optimise your website and improve the user experience. After all, effective user experience is the big stepping stone to successful conversions.

Understanding heatmaps

Depending on the software you use, you’ll be able to access a selection of heatmaps. Different heatmaps will tell you different things. Using a combination of heatmaps allows you to have an understanding of how your user experience is going.

At Exo Digital, we use Hotjar for our heatmaps. Hotjar offers three key approaches to understanding the experience of our users. Let’s take a look!

All clicks map

The all clicks heatmap shows you where your users are clicking. With an all clicks map, you can use the learnings to improve your CTAs (Calls to Action) and see whether there are any bugs or product pain points. For instance, if your users are clicking in areas which are not clickable, that may show that your website is not in sync with user expectations or the visual design may be misleading.

In Hotjar, the all clicks map is colour coded, with the most popular clicks marked in red, then orange, yellow and so on. When you hover over the different areas of the webpage, you can also see the number of clicks and the click percentage.

Move map

The move map provides you insights into where and how your users are navigating through your webpages. The learnings from this heatmap are based on the general consensus that users move their mouse according to where they are looking. With the move map, you can get a picture of the way in which your user is consuming content and interacting with your webpages.

In Hotjar, the areas marked in red get the most movement. This gives you an idea of the most used areas on your webpages and provides the data to optimise your webpage. So, your users can see what you actually want them to see.

Scroll map

As the name suggests, the scroll map shows how far your users are scrolling down your website. This particular heatmap is useful when you want to find out where you’re losing their engagement. The heatmap can also confirm whether your content prioritisation is working hand in hand with user engagement.

In Hotjar, areas in red show that users are scrolling through while blue highlights little or no interaction. With the rise of the smartphone, mobile is a popular medium for users. The scroll map also assists in providing learnings to optimise content across multiple devices.

Start using heatmaps

Heatmaps offer page by page analysis of your website so you can offer the best user experience and continually iterate!

At Exo Digital, our user-centric approach holds success metrics in high regard. Even the most high traffic websites need to be monitored closely. Optimal user experience changes constantly with trends and preferences. The best digital interactions are the websites that keep up with the user.

Chat to one of our consultants today and find out how heatmaps can improve your user experience.