Three myths about heatmaps

The version of this that works is simpler than the version most people imagine. A few things about heatmaps that get repeated more often than they get checked.

Measurement is only useful when someone has agreed in advance what they would do differently. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

“It only matters for big sites”

They show where attention goes, not why. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

“We can deal with it after launch”

Sometimes true, usually expensive. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge.

“Our platform handles it”

Combine with recordings for context. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

What this looks like day to day

Data you do not trust is worse than no data, because it gets quoted anyway. 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 any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.