A short guide to heatmaps

There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. Everything we would tell a client about heatmaps in the time it takes to drink a coffee.

More dashboards rarely produce more decisions. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

Why it matters

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 approach it

Best used to generate hypotheses. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

Where it usually goes wrong

Combine with recordings for context. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

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
• 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 you want a second opinion on how yours is set up, ask.