Using heatmaps to improve your website’s UX: 5 ways to get started

From page design to site usability, there are plenty of factors that impact user experience. But pinpointing the exact cause of poor UX can be a daunting task. 

With heatmaps (also known as “heat maps”), you can visualize key user interactions and gather meaningful insights with ease to ensure your site delivers an outstanding UX throughout the entire user journey.

If you’re a UX designer, developer, or marketer working to enhance the user experience, heatmaps can help you collect data on how people interact with your website, so you can use those insights to improve UX and the metrics that matter to your business.

What is a heatmap?

A heatmap is a data visualization that shows how website users click, scroll, and move on the page. The ‘heat’ part of the name comes from the color scale: red depicts popular (hot) areas of the page, and blue less popular (cold) areas.

‘Hot’ and ‘cold’ engagement areas visualized in a scroll heatmap (left) and a click heatmap (right)

Types of heatmaps

You can collect heatmap data on any website page on desktop and mobile devices, and visualize it in different ways:

• Click maps highlight where users click the mouse (or tap on mobile devices)

• Scroll maps highlight where users scroll on a page

• Move maps highlight user mouse movement (without clicking)

• Rage-click maps highlight areas that cause user frustration

• Engagement zones are an aggregate view of user behavior

• Zone-based heatmaps reveal how users interact with each element on your website

A Contentsquare zone-based heatmap that attributes sales to specific elements

5 ways to use heatmaps to evaluate UX

Here are five key ways you can use different types of heatmaps to collect UX data, validate your ideas, and spot optimization opportunities.

1. Showcase your best-performing designs

Your web pages may look stunning on their own, but heatmaps let you demonstrate to clients and colleagues how well they actually perform.

Heatmaps are easy to understand at a glance and can help you explain your work to non-designers, allowing you to get important buy-in for website redesign proposals or showcase your successful UX design projects. This impact is especially useful if you want your pages to perform better.

Over at Spotahome, an online platform for mid- to long-term property rentals, Customer Knowledge Manager Sara Parcero-Leites uses heatmaps to make sure her team is aware of UX areas that need improvement.

During regularly scheduled meetings, Sara showcases 3–4 interesting heatmaps, along with insights from other tools (like session recording tools), to spark discussion and collaborate on solutions. 

Sara told us that most developers and product managers had never actually seen users interacting with the features they built before she started hosting these meetings and showing them visual evidence like heatmap data—now they leave each meeting with eye-opening information, and plenty of bugs to fix.

2. Find CTAs with the most (and least) clicks

CTAs (calls-to-action) are prompts for user action—usually buttons or links—and can be specifically designed to attract clicks to increase sign-ups or sales.

Click maps show which CTAs have the most clicks, and which are getting ignored. You may find that other page elements distract users from seeing your main CTA, or you might identify an opportunity to test a new CTA in an area that’s attracting more user engagement.

Here’s an example: while introducing experience intelligence tools to his team, Conan Heiselt, a UX designer at the software company Techsmith, discovered that users weren’t interacting with product CTAs as intended—this revelation came by viewing a click map.

After applying a click map to their service page, Conan and his team saw that many users ignored the CTA text buttons and preferred to click on product images, so they decided to make the whole area clickable during a redesign. Concrete visual evidence collected from just one click map enabled his team to provide users with a more intuitive user experience.

3. Measure how far users scroll

Not every user who lands on your website scrolls down to the bottom of each page, which means they might be missing important information. People also visit your site from different devices and browsers, so not all of them get to see the same information above-the-fold (the part of the page that’s immediately visible without scrolling).

This scroll map shows the average fold and that most users see what’s displayed in the red area

Scroll map tools can show you where the average fold is on mobile and desktop devices, so you can place essential information and CTAs where they get seen the most. You can also learn how far down the page users scroll, and move important elements up the page to get them seen by more people.

Remember, you don’t have to look at scroll data on its own; compare your click maps and scroll maps to get a full picture of where you’re losing user attention.

And with Contentsquare, you don’t have to frantically toggle between two or three heatmaps: the streamlined Zone-Based Heatmap combines click, move, and scroll data into one view so you can see which parts of your page users engage with most.

Discover which areas see the most user engagement with a Contentsquare Zone-Based Heatmap

4. Spot problem clicks

Sometimes users click on elements (e.g., images or headings) they expect to be links. These can be mis-clicks, but heatmaps will collect data from enough users to disregard anomalies and show you common click patterns across your audience.

By looking at a click heatmap, you can spot incorrect clicks and fix the issue by adding links there or modifying unimportant elements to make them less clickable.

You may even find website bugs or design errors that frustrate your users, causing them to exit your site. There’s a specialized heatmap to visualize this: Contentsquare rage click maps uncover which elements cause friction by showing where users repeatedly click over a short period of time—it’s the perfect tool to turn to if you want to avoid enraging users during their experience.

5. Optimize for mobile and desktop

Responsive web design (pages that adapt to the user’s screen) is a fast and efficient way to deliver content to all of your users, but you need to remember that what looks like a few lines on a desktop can require a lot of scrolling on mobile devices.

Compare mobile and desktop heatmaps to spot any difference in behavior and see if mobile app users are missing important CTAs or other elements. You may need to design different user-friendly interfaces for mobile and desktop to ensure good UX across all devices.

Using heatmaps to optimize pages for multiple devices significantly increased conversions for Materials Market, a website that connects construction material suppliers with customers across the UK.

Heatmaps revealed how Materials Market mobile users couldn’t see the CTA above the fold

CEO Andrew Haehn used a scroll map to discover that very few mobile users scrolled far enough down the page to see the main CTA, so his team redesigned the button and placed it higher on the page. This simple change contributed to a 1.1% increase in conversion rate, generating £10,000+ more in yearly revenue.

Using heatmaps with other UX tools

Heatmap data looks impressive and will give you plenty of insight on its own, but you’ll get more out of it by combining it with other analytics, feedback, and UX design tools. Let’s look at four examples:

1. Heatmaps + traditional analytics

Traditional web analytics tools (like Google Analytics or Contentsquare’s Product Analytics) give you lots of quantitative data points like page views, traffic sources, and bounce rates, but they can't explain why, or even how they happen.

By combining traditional analytics with heatmap analytics, you can remove some of the guesswork and find out why your metrics occur. Got a page with lots of traffic that doesn’t convert? Then set up a heatmap and start seeing what makes people leave.

2. Heatmaps + session replays

A session replay (or session recording) is a rendering of a user browsing session that lets you watch the actions of a single (anonymized) user across multiple pages.

While heatmaps help you visualize data from all your users at once, replays are created for each individual user. Instead of making assumptions about the clicking and scrolling you see on a heatmap, try viewing some session replays to see how real people actually interact with the page.

To give you a real example, let’s see how replays paired with heatmaps helped digital UX design agency Turum-burum increase shoe retailer Intertop’s store conversion rate by 55%. 

Session replays first revealed that customers experienced issues with Intertop’s product filters—they were browsing through a huge number of pages to look for their shoe size.

After analyzing a click map, the Turum-burum team found that many users were clicking ‘show all’ while searching for a product because they lacked the necessary filters to find what they were looking for.

A click map showed that Intertop customers clicked ‘show all’ while browsing products

With insights gleaned from both session replays and heatmaps, Turum-burum was able to implement a more streamlined filtering feature by identifying and prioritizing clear product categories, an essential navigation element in the ecommerce shopping experience. Turum-burum’s improvement led to a better UX and an increase in sales for their client.

3. Heatmaps + voice of customer 

Quantitative (numerical data) is hugely important for making data-based UX decisions, but don’t overlook the value of qualitative (non-numerical) data.

Uncover valuable insights by directly asking users about why they left your site

After you've used heatmaps to reveal design issues on specific site pages, ask your users for UX feedback on each page to learn what they think is missing or what you should change to help them reach their goals.

Product feedback doesn’t need to be disruptive to users: a simple, non-intrusive one-question poll might be all you need to kick-start some UX improvements that you hadn’t thought about.

In addition to the click map insights that led software company Techsmith to provide a better UX by redesigning their product CTAs, UX designer Conan Heiselt also used surveys to gain a deeper understanding of their customers’ needs.

With a simple on-page survey, Conan asked users who completed certain interactions one open-ended question: “What’s your biggest frustration with this page?” He was able to collect enough answers to identify 15 general themes and start taking action to address specific user needs.

UX improvement areas collected from survey responses

If you don’t have enough time to prepare an in-depth and actionable UX research report like Conan’s, try Contentsquare’s AI for Surveys and watch as it generates an automated report with key insights and suggested next steps based on real feedback from your users.

4. Heatmaps + A/B testing

Heatmap data and A/B testing go hand-in-hand: you can use heatmap data to craft a test hypothesis, and you can run heatmaps on A/B test variations to gather useful data about why a page variation is successful (or not).

Click map data that shows increased user engagement after a page redesign

For example, UX designers at banner design company Bannersnack use heatmaps on key landing pages to gather evidence of how people interact with them. 

Based on the data, the team creates an alternative design and A/B tests the old and new versions. In one test, Bannersnack increased sign-ups by 25% by combining heatmaps insight with A/B testing.

How to get started with heatmaps

Create a heatmap with Contentsquare by booking a demo. We’ll help you set up your first heatmap and so you can start collecting actionable data every time a user visits your site.

Whether you use heatmaps to validate your work, increase conversions, or get ideas for new tests, the invaluable insight you’ll get from these rainbow-colored graphics will likely give your UX approach the shake-up it needs to take your work to the next level.