Great insights for a very low price
August 27, 2018

Great insights for a very low price

Santiago Valdés | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Hotjar

We use it for two things: understand how people react to changes in our design or functionality, and to understand intent (or try to deduce it) with polls. It is mainly used by the marketing team, and we use the video recording feature a lot, and the polls too. We used the feedback button but it's a bit annoying that you can't choose were to show it. It just pops up everywhere and on mobile that might be a bit confusing and annoying.
  • Video recording works very well. You choose which pages to record (based on many factors) and records appear very quick. This is the most useful feature for us. Of course you can't understand intent completely, but certainly there are usability things that will popup quickly.
  • Polls work well too. We have an eCommerce site so we ask different questions in many places, and it has proven to be helpful. You need a certain volume and also beware that it's annoying or confusing for some users. But considering that cost, it might be worthwhile when it's about an important page.
  • Heatmaps works well but they aren't that useful. Yes, the scroll % of people is nice but not as actionable as the other features.
  • The video recording feature is very slow to use. I know there is a very powerful process going on (saving your CSS and the DOM movements you make) but anyway it's slow to use.
  • Hotjar itself is heavy and has effects on your load times. This is a very important issue and I hope they're working on that.
  • Adding more segmentation would be nice. For example, being able to connect your API or more information to show relevant polls or feedback buttons to certain users. Aggregated info is hard to process.
  • We have fixed many issues, for example, checkout usability problems with the video recording feature. You can catch bugs and get an overall idea of how a particular page is working.
  • Polls have helped us pair intent with the video sessions, so we can understand better why certain users answered different things. You get greedy and try to ask everything but that won't work. Keep it simple and it will give you small but important insights.
To be honest, we have only tried Hotjar session recording. I know there are some alternatives but we haven't tried any of them. I think there are none as complete as Hotjar for what you pay (some do heatmaps, other video recording, other polls). And the thing is that all of that is done pretty decent on Hotjar, so I'm not looking for any alternative right now.
For what you pay ($29 in our case) this is an amazing tool and I've seen huge and very small companies use it, so seems like scalability is not an issue at all. If you want to learn more about usability or intent from your customers, this is for you. If you think this will give you all the answers you need.... forget it. This is quantitative research but needs to be heavily paired with qualitative research if you want to understand where the main issues arise.

This can get you to understand the easy first 70% of the problem (which is a lot.) The other 30% requires the same effort but more specific tools and more qualitative research.