8 tactics to uncover issues and prioritize fixes with Hotjar today

This article presents eight actionable ways to empathize with your users without leaving the Hotjar platform. Take inspiration from these examples on how to discover issues and fix them as they arise using Hotjar’s features and tools:

1. Watch session recordings to identify the root cause of poor conversion

2. Generate heatmaps of updated pages to gauge user reception

3. Combine Recordings and Heatmaps for a clearer picture of the customer journey

4. Apply filters to track down bugs and use Highlights to group findings and get buy-in more easily

5. Launch Feedback and Surveys to ask users directly about what bugs them (no pun intended)

6. Run user interviews with Engage to determine common UX challenges

7. Create a dashboard to discover user insights

8. Make the most of Hotjar to stay agile and master prioritization

1. Watch session recordings to identify the root cause of poor conversion

Are your conversion rates rising steadily…but slowly? 

Your gut instinct may be telling you that something’s not clicking. So you try multiple tools for conversion rate optimization (CRO) at once: Google Analytics, heatmap software, a UX agency, and even focus groups representing your target audience. And yet, your conversion rates continue to increase negligibly—think 0.5%—each month. 

This is exactly what happened to StudentCrowd, a decision-making platform for university students in the UK, until they started watching session recordings captured with Hotjar. The solution not only cost less but also bolstered their conversion rates by a whopping 55%.

2. Generate heatmaps of updated pages to gauge user reception

Heatmaps represent visitor interactions via a color scale. They show areas receiving the most (red) to the least (blue) interaction, which comes in the form of:

• Clicks on desktop and taps on mobile

• Mouse movements

• Scrolls

In particular, you can set up a heatmap for each of your popular landing pages before updating them. Then proceed with your landing page optimization plan, which may include making significant changes to the layout, rearranging page elements, or even replacing an existing call-to-action (CTA).

After the redesign, compare the pre-change and post-change heatmaps to spot differences in people’s behavior. See if users are more compelled to take a desired action. Do they get confused when they click or tap on an element and are taken somewhere they didn’t expect? Are they ignoring or missing something you’d like them to focus on?

As a visual tool, a heatmap makes getting your message across easier, whether you’re discussing insights with your team or someone from another department. It’s a must-have for everyone involved in cross-functional collaboration.

3. Combine Recordings and Heatmaps for a clearer picture of the customer journey

Here’s another option for you: mix and match Hotjar’s tools and features to take your website analysis to the next level. Below are steps you can follow as-is or tailor fit to your needs for switching things up on our platform.

Pinpoint problem areas

Capture Recordings of your  customers end-to-end journey. If you notice sales are down, use our built-in filters to narrow down the pages you wish to evaluate. Filters allow you to view relevant session recordings based on specific criteria.

Once you have access to the recordings, identify steps where people encounter issues. It could be that they’re hesitant to log in before checking out, they might feel lost while looking for a product they previously viewed, or ultimately, they’ve grown impatient and abandoned their carts altogether.

Include the voice of the customer

Think like an investigator, so you can piece together what’s happening along the customer journey. Gather first-hand accounts by placing a Feedback widget on specific pages. This tool enables you to hear from your users the moment they encounter issues and lets you in on how they truly experience your site in real time.

Prioritize fixes and opportunities

Generate heatmaps to determine popular and unpopular areas, elements, and features on your website. This visual representation of page views and related data informs your next steps regarding which bug fixes to prioritize and which opportunities to pursue.

4. Apply filters to track down bugs and use Highlights to group findings and get buy-in more easily

You already know filters and recordings work together to help you bust website bugs. But there are other techniques to refine your investigation. Here’s how to uncover issues using this powerful combination:

• Filter recordings by users who rage clicked during a session. Rage clicks are multiple clicks on an element, precisely five clicks within 500 milliseconds of one another—a strong indication that people are encountering a problem when interacting with said element.

• Within the segment of users who rage clicked, sort the recordings by exit page, the last page a person visited before leaving your site. See if a pattern is present on the same exit page and strategically locate where issues exist.

You can use additional filters related to user frustration, such as u-turns, to quickly find UX issues and implement bug fixes. The Error filter is particularly useful for uncovering critical JavaScript console errors: 

Once you’ve spotted an error, you can solve the issue in no time at all with our Jira integration—simply create a new ticket directly from Hotjar to notify your team and provide them with poignant visual evidence.

Further, you can capture a highlight when you find evidence of pain points or blockers from a heatmap or recording. Label a highlight as a bug (🐞), save it, and add highlights to a collection to:

1. Identify patterns

2. Validate assumptions

3. Evaluate the reach and impact of bugs before prioritizing them

4. Group findings and share them with stakeholders later, so you can evaluate the reach and impact of bugs before prioritizing fixes

5. Launch Feedback and Surveys to ask users directly about what bugs them (no pun intended)

When users encounter an issue on your site, ask them to leave a feedback response or complete a survey. Going to them directly enables you to gauge frustration—or delight—about individual parts of your site, such as an entire page, forms, images, or new features. In turn, this tactic helps drive rapid improvements. 

You can also connect user responses to the session recordings that feature them. For instance, you get a comment saying, “it doesn’t work 😡,” which could leave you wondering what exactly does not work. Remove the guesswork around this answer by viewing the associated recording and pinpointing what they’re referring to.

6. Run user interviews with Engage to determine common UX challenges

Go deeper and get closer to your customers by investing in user interviews. There are two immediate benefits to talking to your users as often as possible. For one, it empowers them to participate in developing a product that meets their needs. At the same time, this practice streamlines your workflow and trains your team to iterate faster on their designs. 

The challenge with this type of user research is that it takes time to recruit the right people, schedule interviews, host and record the call, transcribe it later, and share insights. With Engage, the newest addition to Hotjar’s family of products, you can improve the process and spend your time on more important things: building strong relationships with your users.

Start with the following:

Remember: the qualitative insights you glean from user interviews are invaluable. Why? They clarify your users’ main motivations and concerns, sparking impactful changes for you.

7. Create a dashboard to discover user insights

Hotjar’s Dashboard offers an aggregate, visual view of your users’ qualitative and quantitative data, giving you a glimpse of what’s happening across your site. Checking the Dashboard every now and then can clue you in on new insights or pave the path to greater discovery, such as:

• Uncovering issues and understanding the real reason your visitors don’t become customers

• Quickly learning how users really feel about your product by studying user sentiment

• Seeing how users react to UX changes by consulting the rage click and u-turn trends

8. Make the most of Hotjar to stay agile and master prioritization 

Prioritizing bug fixes and product updates could mean building something totally unexpected (and different from what you initially envisioned). But at its core, it’s also about implementing customer-led changes that will keep users happy while simultaneously growing your bottom line.

The Hotjar platform equips your team with tools and features that help you achieve exactly that:

• Detect blockers across the ecommerce customer journey by viewing recordings of multiple pages

• Zoom in on individual pages’ heatmaps to identify and fix the most common UX issues 

• Eliminate guesswork and gain insight into what users actually want through Feedback and Surveys

• Look at the big picture through the Dashboard to spot issues before they become serious, get rid of backlog, and monitor trends to discover if a problem is more of an isolated case or a widespread event that deserves prioritization 

• Deepen insights by employing filters, Highlights, and Events

• Mix and match these strategies to gather your findings, build your case, get support for your ideas, deliver impact, and keep everyone in sync

Implement changes—big or small—with confidence

Keeping an eye on the pain points and blockers your customers face is made more efficient by our intuitive tools and features. If this is your first time trying a heatmap or learning how a session recording works, start by solving simple problems and delivering quick wins.

You’ll get the hang of it the more you practice (and streamline your workflow in the process). Of course, it can go a long way if you remember that with each issue you uncover and bug you fix, you’re taking steps to become better at empathizing with your users. And that’s something worth aiming for when your users’ appreciation and loyalty inevitably manifest as more sales.