What's new in Hotjar

TL;DR:

• Workspaces will no longer be available in Hotjar from December 5.
• Why? It’s getting in our users’ way and not adding enough value.
• No data will be lost. All insights related to your site will be available in a single view.

How we think about retiring features

At Hotjar, we use Hotjar. We watch a lot of session recordings, analyze the cr*p out of our heatmaps, and ask for so much user feedback that we recently had to rein it in because we inadvertently spammed our users. 🤦

We get even more into using Hotjar just after we launch a new feature. Sometimes, it’s a really pleasant experience. We bask in the glow of people using our new feature precisely as we intended and getting tons of value from it. Other times, it’s not so pleasant—users don’t engage with the feature, or it just gets in their way and doesn’t provide any real value.

This was exactly the case with Workspaces, a new feature we launched earlier this year to help our users to organize Hotjar so that they only see what’s relevant to their team or project. We did our research, moved quickly to get value into our users' hands, and shipped an MVP version of Workspaces. We were excited to see our users streamlining their workflows using Workspaces but the data clearly shows that we missed the mark.

Why we’re retiring Workspaces

We looked at a lot of data points but the most telling one is that only 5% of accounts with access to Workspaces have even tried it, with few continuing to use it over time. We’ve also gotten a lot of feedback from our users about how jumping in and out of workspaces has made Hotjar more difficult to use, which definitely isn’t our aim!

When we considered the fact that Workspaces is adding minimal value for a minority of users, combined with the extra friction it’s causing for the majority of users, it became clear that our team would remember Workspaces as a “learning” instead of a “win.” But we don’t see it as a failure–a new feature not working out is an inevitable part of trying to solve problems for our customers in ways that work for our business.

I’m using Workspaces, what will happen?

Thanks for trying it out! You won’t lose any of your data and you don’t need to take any action.

Here’s what will happen from December 5:

• Anything that’s currently sorted into a specific workspace (active or archived) will be accessible in the single view of your site in Hotjar.
• All recordings segments, pinned heatmaps, surveys, feedback widgets, or collections of highlights you created within Workspaces will be retained in the single view.
• You will have one dashboard for the single view. If you’ve customized your dashboards, we’ll automatically default to the most recently updated dashboard.

This will simplify Hotjar for the vast majority of users and make it easier to find insights in fewer clicks, but we appreciate that it will cause disruption for active users of Workspaces and we’re sorry for the inconvenience. We’ll continue to look for more effective ways to help Hotjar users to find, sort, and act on insights about their users’ behavior.