Before you invest in heatmaps

It is rarely the thing that gets a project approved, and often the thing that decides how it goes. Before you spend anything on heatmaps, it is worth confirming a few things are already true.

Data you do not trust is worse than no data, because it gets quoted anyway. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

Prerequisites

• You can describe the outcome you want in one sentence
• Someone owns it after the work is done
• They show where attention goes, not why
• You have a way to tell whether it worked

Warning signs

Best used to generate hypotheses. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

Combine with recordings for context. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

In practice

More dashboards rarely produce more decisions. Three things worth confirming about heatmaps before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Combine with recordings for context — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.