A practical checklist for heatmaps

Teams tend to reach for this after something has already gone wrong. Run through this the next time heatmaps comes up.

Data you do not trust is worse than no data, because it gets quoted anyway. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

The checklist

• They show where attention goes, not why
• Best used to generate hypotheses
• Combine with recordings for context
• Someone is named as the owner
• There is a date to review it again

What it costs to ignore

They show where attention goes, not why. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

How to tell if yours is fine

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

If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.