Item: Hotjar
Rating: 6
Author: Patrick Eng

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We used HotJar to track visitors to our website. We wanted to see where they went, what they clicked on, where they gravitated towards and what wasn't working. We used it to make adjustments to our website to accommodate some of our visitors' actions and habits.

Pros and Cons

Heat maps for where on your website people have scrolled or clicked.
Tracking and monitoring the visitor's journey from the homepage to the product page.
Recordings of all the visitors let you see how they interact with your website, and let you make adjustments based on that.

Form analysis. We used HubSpot forms, but HotJar was not equipped with the capabilities to analyze those forms.
HotJar significantly reduced the loading speed of our website. This became a serious problem and we eventually had to remove it all together.

Return on Investment

We did not use HotJar long enough to gather enough concrete data to make any conclusions. Due to it affecting the speed of our website, we took it down after a few weeks.

Alternatives Considered

We have not used any other similar products. We heard of HotJar from HubSpot and while learning about growth-driven design.

Other Software Used

Wistia, SurveyMonkey, Join.me

Likelihood to Recommend

HotJar is great for tracking visitors' actions on your website. By reviewing recordings of many users, designers and developers can change small things on the website that could have a dramatic impact on its effectiveness. It is also great to see how and why people drop off in the funnel and how one could improve on that.

Users and Roles

1 - They helped our team analyze the traffic that we received on our website. We looked at heat maps and where users dropped off on their journey towards certain pages and/or products. It gave us the necessary information to make educated decisions about how our website could be optimized for a more user-centric experience.

Support Headcount Required

1 - Basic HTML and web development skills. I personally installed Hotjar on various client's websites and analyzed the heat maps. I also set up the funnel analysis and pop-up questions that appeared on certain pages. It does not require any technical knowledge once the tracking script is setup.

Business Processes Supported

Heat maps
User's journey down the funnel
Video recordings
Video Recordings

Innovative Uses

We did not experiment too much with Hotjar

Future Planned Uses

We were not able to use the form analysis section because our forms were not compatible with Hotjar's capabilities. That is something we would definitely want to use in the future.
We did not use any surveys that Hotjar offered but would possibly later

Likelihood to Renew

Even though the heat maps and user recordings were useful, our website was significantly slowed down after we installed Hotjar, so much so, that it took over a minute for our blog to load. The data that we gathered was not worth the length that it took our website to load.

Usability

Overall, it was quite easy to use. Setting up its functionalities did not require any technical skill and was quite user-friendly. It just did not perform as well as we thought it was going to.

Usability Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Relatively simple Easy to use Technical support not required Well integrated Consistent Quick to learn Convenient Familiar	None

Easy Tasks

Understanding the heatmaps
Viewing the user recordings
Setting up pop-up questions

Difficult Tasks

The user journey down the funnel
Figuring out why the forms analysis was not working for our website

Mobile Interface Availability and Impressions

Not Sure - I've never used it it, if it exists

Hotjar - You Decide

Overall Satisfaction with Hotjar