Five Ways to Improve the UX of your Website using Heatmaps Decoding

Selling is more about your customers—users, visitors, the audience—than it is about the products. Putting your users foremost in your designs would make them interact better with your products and website. A user-focused website is better equipped to serve your users’ needs better.

Analytical software provides insights into how your users interact with your website and, ultimately, your products. The software shows how your users navigate your website by tracking the clicks, taps, scrolls, views, etc., with the aid of the software, and you can spot problems like users not scrolling lower than a point in the webpage or users not engaging with the contents on the webpage. How do you fix this? And how can you maximize these insights to get better rewards from your products?

An important aspect to consider is the User experience of your website. Fortunately, the analytics from the software can point you in the right direction to achieve a better user experience. The software uses heatmaps to show how users interact with your website. These heatmaps can be used by your UX designer, developer, or marketer to improve the user experience and increase conversion.

User Experience: A brief

“No product is an island. A product is more than a product. It is a cohesive, integrated set of experiences. Think through all the stages of a product or service—from initial intentions through final reflections, from the first usage to help, service, and maintenance. Make them work together seamlessly.” – Don Norman, inventor of the term “User Experience.”

User Experience (UX) is the way a user interacts with a product or website. UX design is the process of creating products that provide meaningful and relevant experiences to users. It is the design of the entire process of getting the products and integrating them by including branding, design, usability testing, and function. The method of the user experience starts before the device is even in the hands of the user.

Hence, businesses and brands need to provide a great user experience with the consumption and use of the product in mind and the entire process of acquiring, owing, and even testing it for errors. Furthermore, it would be best to focus on creating products that work; a great UX design concentrates on other aspects like how pleasurable, fun, and efficient your products are to users.

Furthermore, to experience great results from your UX designs, you should consider. Why What and How your product is used. The Why considers the reason behind your users’ adoption of your product. It weights the values and views the user has about the product. The What believes the things the user can do with a product and the How to release the design of the functionality pleasingly. In UX design, you take the Why first before determining the What and then the How to bring a meaningful experience to your users.

Finally, in User experience, the designer must be user-centered. Every physical limitation of a user must be considered, such as the inability to read small texts. A UX designer must be from various backgrounds that encompass visual design, programming, psychology, and interaction design. Therefore, it is required that designing for human users means that you must work at a higher scope for accessibility and accommodation by all the weaknesses a user can possess. To get a user-centered design, you must understand all users and use this understanding as the starting point for all design and development.

Heatmaps: A brief

A heat map is a representation of data by colors on a map or diagram. It helps to visualize complex data quickly and increase comprehension at a glance. A heat map is one of the ultimate ways to measure how your users navigate your website.

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” – Peter Drucker.’

The website recording software automatically uses heatmaps to give extraordinary details about how your users use your website. Making it easy for you to pinpoint elements of your website layout that deserve extra attention.

Heatmaps work by changing the overlaid colors by the level of interaction or engagement. With an increase in activity, the colors become more vivid and vice versa for less action. Heatmaps register interactions like clicking, scrolling, movement, attention, and geographical location.

Using heatmaps helps you understand your customer journey, giving you the semblance of you sitting right next to them as they visit your website. Heatmaps measure the user interaction, SiteRecording converts the heatmaps into insights. With heatmaps, you can easily spot trends and highlight issues without crunching numbers or comparing metrics. Overall, heatmaps help to easily navigate your visitors’ behavior and make better business decisions.

Heatmaps give you metrics like clicks, hovers, hover->click rate, hover->click time, hover time, hover order, clicking visitors, the time before hover, a time before click, etc.

Five ways to improve the UX of your website using heatmaps decoding

1. Spot unexpected behaviors

Using heatmap software can help you spot unexpected behaviors from users. Sometimes, users can confuse certain elements on your web page and click on them or a link while expecting a different result. These are called miss-clicks and often happen with images and texts. Most times, these images and texts show a noticeable type of emphasis that makes users miss-click them. Unfortunately, nothing happens when a user clicks on these areas, and you lose a precious click. Hence, to increase conversions, you need to enhance these elements for better optimization.

Heatmaps help you to recognize the popular sections of your webpage. You should place important texts and images in these areas. free online Image editor can be of a great use when it comes to having perfect pictures.

SiteRecording provides a heatmap and helps you follow the movement of a user’s cursor. By following the hovering pattern, you can easily spot any frustration and hesitation from the user while on the webpage.

Furthermore, you can know what your users click often and where best to integrate hyperlinks. Recognizing spots of high activity would let you know where to place essential links and contents.

Finally, heatmaps analysis helps you spot wrong links or poorly designed pages to improve them and increase user experience. Also, you can discover errors and website bugs that need to be optimized.

2. Differences in Devices

Heatmaps help you understand how users interact with your webpage across several different devices. This will give you an idea of how responsive your website is and how much information users have access to from each device.

You can look at the click metric of the heatmaps of the same page on both desktop and mobile. This will help you know the most clicked elements on either of the devices.

Heatmap analysis can help you spot the opportunity areas for each device. So, you can know what to place where on different devices. For example, if mobile users click the ‘Menu’ bar most and desktop users click the ‘Pricing’ tap more, you can know where to incorporate the pricing link for mobile users and the CTA for desktop users. This information quickly helps you improve the UX for both your mobile and desktop customers.

3. Hottest CTAs and CTA placement:

Using well-placed CTA buttons will make a massive difference in the user experience of your webpage. CTAs prompt users to take action—the action required to complete a conversion rate optimization. Call to action can encourage clicks, capture leads, increase sign-ups and attract new customers. However, having a wrongly placed CTA is as bad as not using a CTA at all. As such, it is essential that users can quickly know what to do next and where the CTA button is.

Heatmaps will give you an assessment of how much traction your primary CTAs are getting. By using the click metric of the heatmap, you can know the hottest clicked element of your page. Knowing what is most clicked will let you know how well the placement of your CTA is. If your CTA is not getting the traction, it is by its position, and you should consider moving it to the area with higher clicks. Conversely, if your CTA is placed where the traction is high and yet producing low conversions, you should revise your CTA copy.

Furthermore, heatmaps will let you know if other prominent features on your web page distract users from engaging your primary CTA. Hence, you can decide whether you need to add lead-generating elements to those areas.

4. User Scrolling

Users have a short attention span, and only a few users scroll to the bottom, while about half manage to scroll to the middle of the page. This means that you should place essential and sensitive information at the top of the page so users do not miss it. The best practice would be to put information in a descending format, with the most important at the top of the page and the least important at the bottom of the page.

On assessing the scrolling data page of your heatmap analysis, you will see the color gradient of your webpage. The color thins out from top to bottom. Usually, the scroll data should show a gradual thinning out of the color—from hot to cold—from top to bottom, but there can be a sharp switch along with the webpage. This shows that your visitors topped scrolling and exited your webpage.

Heatmap can improve user scrolling for optimal user experience by helping you know if you laid out your content correctly on your website. It enables you to know if your design elements like the contact form appear too early or if your scroll is too long and your visitors are lost and left.

SiteRecording supports session recording and can help you find out why a user journey with your website stops. This information will give you valuable insights about what element you need to optimize it and also give you a good idea of how to do it.

Conclusion

Customers—users, visitors, the audience—are kings, and you should relate with them as such. The success of your business or products lies in your users’ perspective of you. Hence, you need to implement a user-centric experience for your visitors.

Hopefully, this article has given you some insights on how heatmaps can help you improve the UX of your webpage. We are optimistic that these insights will prove invaluable and will help you increase your rate of conversion funnel.

SiteRecording is a very convenient option to monitor your website. The software produces heatmaps on the basis of several metrics that you can use to improve the user experience of your website. Get started on your SiteRecording journey now