Heat Maps in UX

A heatmap is a way to visualize how users interact with your website. It’ll allow you to see areas of high activity — your website hotspots — signified with a warmer red or orange color, and areas of inactivity visualized in cooler tones.
They can offer more insight than simply tracking the usual website KPIs, helping to identify areas for improvement and, in turn, how you can improve your user experience and conversion rates.
Essentially, heatmaps help make complex data simple to understand at-a-glance. So they’re an excellent tool for those who prefer a visual approach to their marketing.

Scroll maps give you the actual proportion of people who scroll to any point on the page: the more red the location, the more users had seen it. A scroll map is a website heat chart displaying how quickly users travel down a site. The most noticeable and least prominent portions of a website from hot (popular) to cold (unpopular) can be obtained with scroll maps on a laptop, smartphone, tablet, and screen.

Next up is movement. This one shows you everywhere your users have moved their mouse on the page, regardless of whether they clicked or not.

There are 2 main types of heat maps in eye tracking, and they’re very different. A fixation volume heat map shows which parts of the page attracted the highest number of eye fixations. Fixation duration heat map shows how long they looked in a particular spot. For example, a fixation volume heat map will be more useful to understand which content actually stands out in a design (i.e. is the most eye-catching), while a fixation duration heat map might provide more insight into which content was most visually interesting for users.

Lastly, the all-important click data. Yes, you could probably get the majority of this data from Google Analytics but the website click heatmaps help visualize clearly which sections are working and which are not. For everywhere that has been clicked, you can also get the exact number of clicks and what percentage that is of the entire sample size.
The click map is also good for identifying areas that may be causing frustration, for example, a text headline that people are clicking on that isn’t hyperlinked to anything else. Of course, it also helps you see clearly if people are clicking on your key CTAs.

Once you know what you want a page to do (its key goal), it’s time to figure out how to measure that. Mouseflow gives you a lot of different metrics compared to other heatmap software providers. Some of our key metrics are:

Although heat maps can provide valuable insights into user behavior, they should not be relied upon as the sole source of information for your website decisions. It’s important to supplement heat map analysis with other reliable user testing methods to make well-informed and data-driven design choices.

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