Heatmaps: what to get right first

This is one of those topics that looks small until it costs you something. If you only fix one thing about heatmaps this quarter, make it the first item below.

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.

Start here

They show where attention goes, not why. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

Then this

Best used to generate hypotheses. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

Eventually

Combine with recordings for context. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

The short version

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
• Best used to generate hypotheses — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.