Signs it is time to revisit heatmaps

Teams tend to reach for this after something has already gone wrong. A few signals that heatmaps is due some attention.

Measurement is only useful when someone has agreed in advance what they would do differently. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

The signals

• Nobody can say when it was last reviewed
• The answer depends on who you ask
• They show where attention goes, not why
• Best used to generate hypotheses

How to approach it

Combine with recordings for context. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

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
• 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

The point is not perfection, it is knowing which of these you have consciously chosen to skip.