What to ask your agency about heatmaps

We end up explaining this on discovery calls often enough that it deserved writing down. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on heatmaps, these questions are worth asking early.

More dashboards rarely produce more decisions. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

They show where attention goes, not why. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

Combine with recordings for context. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

How to tell if yours is fine

Measurement is only useful when someone has agreed in advance what they would do differently. Three things worth confirming about heatmaps before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• They show where attention goes, not why — 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.