When heatmaps is worth the effort

It is rarely the thing that gets a project approved, and often the thing that decides how it goes. Heatmaps is not free, and pretending otherwise leads to bad decisions.

Measurement is only useful when someone has agreed in advance what they would do differently. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

When it is worth it

They show where attention goes, not why. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

When it is not

If nothing downstream depends on it and nobody is complaining, it can wait. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions.

How to decide

Combine with recordings for context. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

How to tell if yours is fine

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

Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.