What's new in Hotjar

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.

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?