Why (and how) we built Hotjar’s new brand
Always wanted to know what goes on behind a rebrand? Well now’s your chance. We’ve got a new look and feel at Hotjar, and we want to tell you exactly why (and how) we rebranded.
Read our blog to discover:
- What we set out to do, and how brands like Patagonia inspired us on our way
- How we aimed to better serve our users—a community full of students, entrepreneurs, SMBs, and mid-market enterprises
- How we decided on our new shiny logo, a blazing new set of colors, a playful new typeface, and more
- Why our brand fits with how we want people to feel about Hotjar now and in the future
Our rebrand was some journey. Now, it feels like we have something to be proud of, that makes Hotjar look just like Hotjar should.
We hope you enjoy the read.
Read MoreHotjar has joined forces with Contentsquare
We're very excited to share with you that Hotjar has joined forces with Contentsquare!
What Hotjar is to entrepreneurs, small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and mid-market companies, Contentsquare is to enterprises. Founded in Paris in 2012, today they help over 750 enterprises in 26 countries deliver better digital experiences for their customers.
While this opens up an exciting new chapter for Hotjar, both companies will continue to operate independently for the foreseeable future, and rest assured we will maintain the same exact level of service and support to all our clients and continue to deliver on our roadmap as planned.
What this does mean, is that in the near future, we will be accelerating our innovation and new product development as we leverage Contentsquare’s technology and resources; such as their recently launched cookieless technology, their acquisition of machine and deep learning startup Upstride, and their recent $500 million Series E investment round.
As a final note, we reflect on how well the Hotjar core values have guided us throughout our journey these last seven years. We see our next chapter as a great opportunity to put you, our customers, even more at the heart of what we do, whilst being bolder, moving faster and continuing to challenge ourselves to grow. And while things will evolve at Hotjar (no doubt for the better), we promise to stay true to working with respect and gaining your continued trust with transparency.
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Focus your time on users who take specific actions in your product ⚡
Have you ever wanted to watch recordings of users who visited yoursite.com/checkout, but didn’t click “Buy”, so you could discover opportunities to improve your checkout flow?
How about sending an error event to Hotjar when your user encounters an issue, and being able to find all the recordings of users who experienced it, so you can see exactly what happened and build a case to fix it?
Maybe you’ve thought about automatically putting a survey in front of users just after they tried your new feature so you can find out how they feel about it?
Every product experience is different, and the user actions that are crucial in one product are insignificant in another. Targeting and filtering based on those key user events that are unique to your product experience will give you a deeper understanding of your users’ behavior.
This is a common use case of product teams, and while it’s possible to achieve in Hotjar using separate Javascript triggers and tags, we haven’t exactly made it easy. Until now.
Introducing Hotjar’s Events API
We’ve just released a new Events API that will allow you to send custom events to Hotjar, then use those events across Hotjar to do things like filter your recordings list, zone in on the insightful part of a long recording (with events now appearing in the timeline), or ask your users for feedback at the moment when they’ve just taken an important action.
Filtering your recordings to see what users experienced before they added an item to their cart or adding a rating
Seeing at what point in the recording a new user subscribed so you can skip right to that part
Here’s how to get started sending your important custom events to Hotjar, and getting a better understanding of your users with less time spent searching through recordings or survey responses to find the most relevant ones.
Events vs User Attributes
You may already be aware of our Identify API that sends custom user attributes to Hotjar. Attributes can also be used to filter recordings or target surveys, but they represent a different kind of data. User attributes are identifying characteristics of the user, like their nationality, job title, or price plan. They’re not tied to a specific point in time.
Importantly, user events are actions that a user takes at a specific point in time. They’re timestamped and can take place multiple times throughout the user journey. This is why you’ll see events represented in the timeline of a recording, where attributes are not.
So… to summarize:
- To send user attributes to Hotjar, use our Identify API - here’s how.
- To send user events to Hotjar, use our Events API - here’s how.
If you’re already using Javascript triggers or tags, don’t worry. They’ll continue to work, they’ll just be called ‘events’ instead. Events API is available on Hotjar’s Plus, Business, and Scale plans.
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🔍 Zoom out to add context to user feedback and validate issues before acting
“When in doubt, zoom out” is a favorite saying of stock market investors. It reminds them not to make rash decisions based on a single data point but to take a broader perspective instead. There’s something valuable product teams can learn from this. It can be tempting to make product decisions based on feedback from a single user who shouts loud enough, but that user isn't always representative of your larger user base.
What should an effective product team do instead?
Listen to your user, of course, but before you start working on a product improvement or bug fix based on a single user’s feedback, you should:
- Zoom out to understand the context around that user’s feedback. That way you can be sure you’ve fully understood the issue and you’ll be better able to find the right solution.
- Zoom out further to validate that the issue affects more users. This will allow you to build a solid case and get buy-in from your team to prioritize the work.
How can I achieve this using (new features in) Hotjar?
We’ve heard product teams describe this use case time and again, but up to now it’s been quite a manual process in Hotjar. When your user told you something insightful via Incoming Feedback on your site, finding the recording of what the user experienced, or a heatmap of the page where they experienced the issue, was cumbersome. So we’ve made it a lot easier:
- Zoom out: We’ve added a new ‘Play’ button to incoming feedback responses where you’ve also captured a recording of the user’s session. This means you can click straight through to the relevant recording and see what the user experienced before speaking up.
- Zoom out further: Once you’ve understood the issue, you can click on the new heatmap icon inside the Recordings player. This will take you straight to a heatmap of the page you’re seeing at that point in the recording, allowing you to determine if more users have had the same issue.
Pulling it all together, connecting Incoming Feedback with Recordings and Heatmaps will help you to identify, understand, and validate user issues, and make better product decisions.
Here’s an example of the entire process in an 18-second GIF:
- The user clicks on a broken 'Learn More' link on the ACME site and leaves feedback saying 'Why doesn't it work?'.
- The Product Manager at ACME clicks 'Play' beneath the feedback in Hotjar and watches the recording of what the user experienced.
- The PM then clicks on the heatmap icon to find that lost more users have been trying to click the same broken link.
The issue has been flagged, understood, and validated faster than you can say "continuous discovery" 🙌
Get started by jumping into your Incoming Feedback responses and clicking on 'Play'.
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Reduce drop-off and increase responses with Survey Performance
When it comes to better understanding your users’ needs, creating a survey is the easy part. The biggest challenge is actually getting your users to complete it 🤭.
Your survey is one of many other survey requests your users see each week, so how do you make sure that yours is the one they finish? The latest addition to Hotjar Surveys will help you identify opportunities to optimize your survey, so more respondents make it to the finish line 🏁.
The new Survey Performance tab gives you a high-level overview of how your survey is performing, as well as a question-by-question breakdown of impressions and where respondents are dropping off 🕵️♀️. This new view helps you to easily spot when a survey is performing poorly, and which questions are causing respondents to give up — so you can make changes that have a positive impact on your response rate, and bring in higher quality survey responses.
See how your survey is performing at a glance 🔎
The survey overview gives you a snapshot of your survey’s overall performance by surfacing metrics like impressions, starts, completes, and completion rate. From here, you can quickly tell if your survey is collecting enough responses, or if something’s amiss 🤔.
If impressions are high but the completion rate is low, then it’s time to roll up your sleeves and see exactly where respondents are dropping off 📉.
See which questions cause the highest drop-off 🕵️♀️
The survey breakdown gives you a question-by-question analysis of your survey performance. This breakdown includes the question, question type, impressions, drop-off count, and drop-off rate—equipping you with key data to create more successful surveys. For example, if the drop-off count and drop-off rate are significantly higher for a specific question, it’s time to take action.
Here are a few things you can investigate when you see a considerable drop-off in your survey:
- Is the survey too long? If you’re optimizing for completed survey responses, try to keep it short.
- Is it the right question type? Try rephrasing the question and using other options like radio buttons, checkboxes, rating scales, or short text answers to capture more responses.
- Are you asking for personal information? Sometimes respondents don’t want to share their personal data, try making questions that ask for email or phone number optional.
- Are questions skippable? Allow respondents to skip this question and see if the drop-off rate decreases.
- Is it showing to the right audience? Perhaps respondents are dropping off because questions are not relevant to them. Get laser-focused and target users with specific attributes that are specific to your goal.
Make small changes to your survey questions over time until you see a decrease in drop-off rates and an increase in survey completions. Take note of what works for your audience and use your learnings to make your next survey a success from the get-go.
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📍 Easily find the insightful moments in your recordings
Watching user recordings is a great way for product teams to put themselves in their users’ shoes. They help you to find issues, prioritize product improvements, and validate if a feature you’ve released is being used as you intended. Is anything ever really used exactly as you intended...? 🤦♀️
User recordings shed light on all of this, but sometimes it feels like you’re looking for a needle in a haystack. Only some recordings give you the insight you're looking for (see our update on sorting your recordings by relevance) and it’s only certain parts of each recording that contain the really valuable nuggets of gold. That’s where our new player timeline comes in.
It’s now much easier to skip past periods of inactivity where your user went to make a cup of tea (presumably 🤷) and jump right to the parts where they did something like visit the page you’re interested in, u-turn, rage click, or leave feedback.
Here’s a (painful) example of how our new timeline helps you jump straight to the insight:
Take the below screenshot of a recording where one of your fellow Hotjar users is, admittedly, having a bad time using Hotjar. This is an example of one of those hopefully rare recordings that’s painful to watch, but gives you tons of valuable insight into your user’s experience, and forms a crucial part of your product discovery process.
We've split the recording down the middle so it's easier to see.
Here’s what’s changed to help you get to the sometimes cringey but always insightful bits:
- We’ve removed the scrolling markers. They were cluttering up the timeline and scrolling is not as relevant as things like clicking, tapping, or typing. These are all still marked on the timeline.
- Periods of inactivity are represented by a thinner line. This makes it easier to skip past the parts that aren’t valuable and avoid wasting time. And remember you can always toggle skip inactivity ON to do it automatically.
- Pages visited are now shown as sections. When you hover on the section, it will show the URL of the page the user was navigating through.
- The really important markers are more prominent. Notice the smiling face of one of our PMs, Sam, where he left a comment alerting the rest of us to the pain that was to follow. There are also yellow u-turn markers, an orange rage-click marker, and a red marker where our user left feedback with (predictably) negative sentiment.
Why not jump into Recordings now and see how quickly you can find insights that help you empathize with your user and inform your product decision-making?
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