HotJar for UX Design
November 06, 2018
HotJar for UX Design
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Hotjar
We use HotJar to get detailed user interaction data to help validate and influence usability and design decisions. When designing our web products, we have a relatively limited ability to do the breadth and depth of usability research before we launch new features. When new features do get released, they are validated only by that small audience. Using HotJar, we are able to get more data than we know what to do with to help validate or invalidate our decisions made at launch.
- User session video capture - HotJar allows us to conduct usability testing as if we were sitting behind a user, interacting with our web software. Although we don't get audio, we can see exactly how a user interacts and moves around our software. We can see clicks, mouse movements, time spent during any given activity, and more. And best of all, the video timeline gives us timestamps/markers where major interactions happened, allowing us to find those interactions quickly.
- Hot spot heat maps - Just like any good analytics tool, HotJar provides great colored heat maps of how frequently users clicked/interacted on different parts of our web page. This gives us a quick, at-a-glance idea of what our users are focusing on.
- Dynamic user surveys - Sometimes pure interaction data is not enough to get the info we need. Luckily, HotJar gives us the ability to create dynamically-driven surveys on our web app. These surveys can be change without needing to re-deploy our entire application - they can be updated through the HotJar tool.
- Customization of in-page user surveys - Although it is a great tool to be able to publish and update user surveys that appear on our web page, the customization options (mostly UI) are somewhat limited, making the survey either stick out like a sore thumb, or look like an advertisement or error on our site. It would be great to get a little bit more control over how the survey appears on our site.
- Honestly, I have not run into any other major examples I can detail where HotJar has not been able to do what I have needed it to do!
- Our UX team can now use hard data to back up and validate design decisions that we make. Our role as usability experts is becoming more respected and integral to business objectives because we now have data that can back up our field of study and prove that our roles are demonstrably useful and necessary.
- HotJar allows our small team of 3 UX designers to get research data as if we were a much larger team. Instead of painstakingly using our time to do guerrilla research, endless user observations, and other types of manual testing, we can now get a significant portion of our data from HotJar.
- Using HotJar is actually giving our team a sense of excitement and enjoyment in our day-to-day usability work. Instead of seeing UX as a chore, HotJar is making data gathering and analyzing more fun, because we can see tangible results from a much larger pool of user/user-data than we could in the past.
HotJar was selected for a few reasons:
- Video Capture - HotJars video capture of user sessions is nothing short of amazing. It is so useful (not to mention cool) to see, in real time, how users interact with our software. It makes our jobs so much easier and more enjoyable to get this type of d
- User Surveys - The ease and flexibility of surveys we can make available on our website are an awesome tool to get additional data.
- Simple implementation - Adding a very small amount of code to our website gives us the ability to use all of HotJars features without having to touch our code again.