Use Heat Maps to Evaluate the Overall Website UX

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Use Heat Maps to Evaluate the Overall Website UX

As per the name user experience also known as user experience, it is all about the UX Design Services’ users. While collecting data, it makes quite a sense that the more user-focused you are, the better prepared you will be while making optimizations that serve your user’s requirements. However, you might have already got some clues regarding the user behavior from the user experience traditional analytics data like:

  • Bounce rate
  • Pageviews
  • Conversions

The question is, how to know what to fix first when you encounter an issue and where to start from when you are looking for increased conversation?

If you are a user experience developer, designer, or marketer working on enhancing the user experience, then the heat maps might help you in collecting data regarding people interacting with your website. You can use this insight for improving user experience along with its metrics that have a high impact on your merchandise.

What is a heat map?

A heat map is referred to as the data visualization showing how the website users scroll, click, and move on the page. UX Design Services have also mentioned it in their several posts. The heat section of the name comes from the color scale: blue shows cold areas (less popular) and red shows the hot (more popular) areas of the page.

You can also collect the heat map data on any of the websites on mobile or desktop to visualize in different ways:

  • Click maps: Click maps highlight the places where the users click the mouse or tap on the mobile phones.
  • Scroll maps: It shows the user scrolling over a page
  • Move maps: It shows the user’s movement without clicking the mouse.

However, if you are not sure what the heat maps look like, look for UX Design Services for multiple examples.

Ways of evaluating UX using heat maps.

A picture is worth a thousand words, so is the heat map; worth a thousand insights. The thousand insight list may be long for this article, henceforth, here are five ways to use heat maps for collecting the UX data for validating your spot optimization chances and ideas to get started.

  1. Showcase the best designs: Your web pages might look astonishing on their own; however, the heat maps will help in demonstrating the performance to the colleagues and the clients. Heat maps are the easiest to understand at once and may help in explaining your performance to non-designers. It also allows you to get important buy-in for website redesign proposals to showcase your best and successful projects.
  2. Search for CTAs with most clicks: Calls to action or CTAs are prompts for the user action; usually the links or buttons that can be certainly designed for attracting clicks for increasing the sign-up sales. Click maps show the CTAs having more clicks and the ones getting ignored. You might find factors that are distracting the users from looking at your main CTA or target a chance for testing a new CTA in a section attracting more user engagement.
  3. Mark the users scroll: Not every user scrolls from top to bottom who lands on your website; means they miss some important information. People might visit your site from multiple browsers and devices so they are not going to get the same information above-the-fold, a section of the page that is immediately visible without scrolling. Scroll map tools also show the average fold location on desktop or mobile. This way you can place important information along with the CTAs where they get clicked the most. Moreover, you can also check how far down the page users scroll and take the elements up the page for getting them seen by maximum people. Always keep in mind that you do not have to look at the scroll data at all, compare scroll maps and click maps to gain a fuller picture of where the user’s attention lacks.
  4. Spot problem clicks: Many a time the users click on elements such as headings and images that they are expecting to be linked. They can be mis-clicks; however, the heat maps will gather data from around the users for disregarding the anomalies to show you the common click patterns among your audience. You can mark the incorrect clicks by looking at the click heat maps and fix the issue by adding links or modifying unimportant elements to make them less clickable. You can also find design errors or website bugs that are irritating your users.
  5. Optimize for desktop and mobile: Pages that adapt to the users’ screen, also known as responsive web design are efficient and fast ways to deliver content to your users; however, you must remember that what looks like a few lines on desktop or mobile might require a lot of scrolling. Compare desktop and mobile heatmaps to check if the mobile users are lacking important CTAs or look out for any differences in behavior. You might need to design different interfaces for desktop and mobile to guarantee good UX among all the devices.

Using heat maps with other UX tools

Heat map data looks quite impressive and gives you multiple insights on its own; however, you might get more out of it by combining it with other feedback and analytics tools. Here are a few examples:

  1. Heat maps and traditional analytics: Just like Google Analytics, the traditional analytics tools give you lots of quantitative data points such as traffic sources, bounce rates, and page views. Yet they cannot explain how or why they happen. You can also eliminate some of the guesswork to find out why the metrics occur by using heat maps and traditional analytics altogether. In case you have a page with good traffic that does not convert, set up a heat map to check the reason for people leaving your website.
  2. Heat maps and session replay: It is a rendering of a user browsing period that helps your look at the actions of an anonymized user among multiple pages. Whereas, the heat maps let you visualize data from every user altogether and replays are made for every user individually.
  3. Heat maps and on-page feedback: Numerical data is highly important for making data-based UX decisions; however, do not overlook the importance of non-numerical data. Once you have used the heat maps for revealing the design errors on a certain site page, consult the users for UX feedback on every page to ask them what is missing and what can be enhanced to reach the goal.
  4. Heat maps and A/B testing: A/B testing and heat maps go hand-in-hand. You can run the heat maps on A/B test variations for gathering useful data and to craft a test hypothesis regarding the page variation of being successful or not.

Conclusion:

By simply adding a tracking script, the website heat map tool such as Hotjar is very easy to use. You can set the heat map in minutes to gather the data every time a user visits your website. The invaluable insight you will get from these rainbow-colored graphics will likely give your UX approach the shake-up it needs to take your work to the next level, whether you use heat maps to get ideas for new tests, heat maps to showcase your work, or increase conversions.

Types of heat maps

We can identify three main classes of heat maps or heatmaps according to their use in digital marketing:

  • Click maps. They represent the areas where users click the most number of times. They are usually the most reliable types of maps, since they are based on concrete actions, not on the simple movement of the mouse on the screen.
  • Mouse movement maps. They are the maps that record the mouse’s passage on the screen, and thus measure the areas of the web with the most activity.
  • Scroll maps. Used in unique scrolling pages, they detect which points of the website receive the most attention from the audience.

Objectives of heatmaps

As we anticipated before, heat maps or heatmaps are used in web analytics. But let’s see in a more precise way the main objectives of the use of this type of graphics.

Know the most visible spaces or elements of our website

The heat maps give us all the information about the different elements of our web space. If we want, for example, to highlight a certain section of our site, heatmaps can give us data about its hot spots, in order to be able to locate that section in the site with the greatest visibility.

Measure the most conducive sites on our website to place advertising

Related to the previous one, the heat map can guide us on the most favorable places on our website to place ads. In general, the hot spots or places of greater attention are not the most recommended to be used for advertising, since they would mislead the content of the web itself.

As far as design is concerned, a heat map can also guide us on the arrangement of graphic elements. For example, if the image-text combination that we use is correct (if the main points of attention are focused on the images, perhaps we should change them for others in favor of the attention to the written content)

 

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