Item: Hotjar
Rating: 10
Author: Chris Lenhart

Overall Satisfaction with Hotjar

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Hotjar is my go to source for capturing user feedback within our site. It makes it easy to automate surveys, trigger polls based on specific user actions, record user sessions so that you can observe behavior, and analyze where users are dropping off of your forms. Best of all, it's completely free to try and fairly cheap to purchase.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Surveys - you can create surveys and trigger them automatically within your app. Hotjar will collect and visualize the data for you.
Session Recordings - you can record whole sessions or trigger them when a user visits a certain page to see how people really behave on your site.
Polls - you can ask your users a question at any point in their journey. Particularly useful when combined with tag manager.
Regex targeting - use regular expressions to target groups of pages.

Cons

Forms could be easier to target.
Incoming feature is slightly redundant with polls.
Branching surveys would be nice.

Return on Investment

Allows us to automate survey collection and analysis - all we do is look at the results and compare to the last quarter.
Useful for analyzing where users are dropping off using recordings.
Heatmaps allowed us to optimize our home page.

Alternatives Considered

The free version of hotjar is still incredibly useful, not severely limited as some other products are. They are also willing to work with you if it is necessary to bill annually, and the full version opens up a lot more specific kinds of targeting for more in depth research and analysis.

Other Software Used

Google Analytics, MS SharePoint

Likelihood to Recommend

Hotjar is great for gathering user feedback for almost any kind of web application. You can use it whenever you want to ask your users a question or series of questions, or see how they behave, where they click, and how far they scroll. If your app is a single page application, you may need someone with a bit of front end dev experience and Google Tag Manager to make the most of it.

Comments

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Hotjar is free and useful.