Hotjar gets so much right then trips on the basics

This time we're going to take a look at Hotjar.

So this is a really interesting tool that allows you to review heat maps and recording sessions or visitors to your website or users of your product.

I think there's a number of different things you can add like surveys and feedback tools in there as well.

So the plan is to sign up for the product, go through the onboarding, and hopefully experience some value early on.

Whilst I'm doing that, I'll just share my thoughts on the user experience and as you know by now, if you've seen a few of these videos, if I think there's something that's just not working or can be improved, I'll call it out.

So I'm going to sign up for the product as if I was a new user.

So we're going to click get started for free over here.

Okay, so this is a really interesting sign up page.

okay, so first things first, we're asked to create our account.

Now immediately my eye is drawn obviously to this section over here on the right where we've got the title.

More Engagement, Less Frustration, Easy to Use Insights.

I like the title, it's short and it's snappy.

and I like the fact that they've pulled through some screenshots of the product over here on the right as well.

I think it's useful I think it's useful for users to be able to see what they're getting into.

And then there's obviously lots of social proof here as well.

So this is trusted by over 3,000 enterprise brands and it's been used on 1.3 million websites and applications.

And then they have other social proof in the form of logos beneath that as well.

So lots of social proof that's working really hard here.

Anyway, I'm going to create an account the other thing I'm slightly puzzled by is select a country.

which is a rather strange thing to ask somebody at this point.

I'm sure there's a reason for it, although I don't think that's particularly clear.

And I kind of figured they'd have an idea of where I'm based, from my IP address, but maybe not.

So it feels to me like an unnecessary step for me to do this, anyway, let's select United Kingdom and then we've either got an option to use our email address or we can use Google to sign up.

The option to use an email has mary, um.jacksoncompany.com as a placeholder.

I'm not sure, we need to have a placeholder for an email form field.

I just don't think people need that level of guidance here.

Now the other thing worth noting is this little checkbox down here, right?

So don't send me product updates, event news and relevant offers.

So what they're saying is by default we're opting you in unless you pay attention to this small print.

For me, kind of annoying if I'm honest.

And I assumed with GDPR that people had to opt in to receive these things, not tick the box to opt out.

Anyway, I think signing up with Google, is much easier, much more straightforward.

So that's the option I'm going to use now.

So let's sign up with Google.

Okay, so it says we need to complete our profile.

Now they couldn't retrieve my last name from Google and they want me to enter it below to continue signing up.

the graphic on the right hasn't changed.

Even though this feels like a different page before we're signing up.

Now we're completing the profile.

I might have swapped something out for something a little bit more relevant there.

And you also note that the email and the name form fields, they're disabled.

You can see that as I'm hovering over.

But also you can't read any of the text in there.

So if I wanted to confirm that they've pulled through or that I've used the correct email address and they've pulled through the correct name.

Really going to struggle to do that.

Gray text a gray form field really doesn't work anyway.

Let's click name and we can enter that in there Alright, let's click Continue.

Okay.

not sure what it's doing.

It's not telling me whether anything's failed or.

Yeah, I'm not sure what it's doing at this point.

I've clicked Continue.

It doesn't appear to be loading or going to the next step in the process.

So either something's broken here or I'm not doing something right.

Okay.

So after pressing Continue for about 4,000 times, I've managed to get through to the first step in the process.

So looks like they're going to take us through the onboarding now and hopefully this is not too long because what I want to do is I want to get into the product okay, so this is the first step of the onboarding process and hopefully this won't take too long and we can get into the product and test the product itself So it talks about creating your profile.

kind of already thought we did that.

And they're telling us they're going to tailor the experience for me and the team.

Are they really?

I don't know.

Let's find out.

Okay, so, we've got some multiple choice questions here.

Now these are normally per page.

So you go through an onboarding sequence like this and typically products would ask one question per page, which makes it easy for users.

I think it's less overwhelming and I think it helps build some momentum in this case, for whatever reason.

It looks like we've got three questions on this first page.

So it's asking me, which role best describes your job?

Let's go with design.

What's your organization name?

So it's already got in here a placeholder.

Well, it's not a placeholder actually.

Acme, it's already filled this in.

I don't know where it's got this from.

but now I guess the onus is on the user to remove this and then add their own organization name, which I guess wouldn't have been necessary if they didn't have that there in the first place.

I know it feels like I'm being hypercritical here, but I think a lot of these small UX decisions add up over the course of this experience.

Now as I was typing there, it's clearly filled in the next question for me.

So how many employees work at Simon McCabe?

So obviously the third question is linked to the organization name.

That's fine.

Let's go with 1 to 10.

One of the small detail here is the selection of the chip.

it's just not very clear.

I think this could be a lot clearer because by the time I'm ready to hit continue, I just want to glance over this and just make sure I've answered these correctly.

and I can't do that if I can't read these at a glance.

Anyway, the continue button's nice and clear, so let's hit that one.

So, next step in the process then, we are asked to add our first project.

and this is going to get us a lot closer to understanding some of the insights.

Like I think this is a really great step in the process.

in many ways you could argue this, this could be a mandatory step in the process because without connecting without adding your URL, you're kind of just unable to track insights at this point.

So I think this is really important.

I think the graphics on the left are kind of doing this somewhat of an injustice here.

for me I think you could make much better use of that space and show me some of the insights I'm going to get by adding my website.

it just feels like a missed opportunity to encourage users So first question then.

where do you want to track insight?

So we can enter URL or an IP address for the project.

It says it can be website, product or a section.

so I'm going to plug in my own website here.

For the most part I think it feels unnecessary to have real time form validation on a field like this because inevitably as I'm typing the URL, I'm getting an error message underneath.

So it feels like I'm doing something wrong.

I haven't, I just haven't finished typing in the URL here.

So let's do that now and then I assume that's going to disappear.

Yep.

And then next question then.

So what's the name of this project?

I'm going to use something that's easy to understand and matches what you're going to analyze okay, so it's got some suggestions in there, which is nice.

And then we've got some placeholder as well.

So I'm just going to type in here my website.

Okay, so let's hit continue.

Okay, so it looks like we've been taken straight to a getting started page and I think that works quite well.

we've got like a personalized welcome up here at the top where we have my name.

And then it talks about setting up account and getting started so we can get the most out of Content Square.

Now we know we started this process from the Hotjar website, So it talks about setting up my account and getting started to get the most out of it.

Obviously it refers to Content Square here rather than hotjar.

Appreciate.

That's where we started the process, but hotjar is now owned by Content Square.

So I guess that makes sense even if it isn't, that consistent.

So there are a few things that I think are working really well here.

so they talk about the fact that this page will be available until we've completed all of the steps in the process to finish setting up the account.

So I think that's really useful because there's nothing worse than getting into the product, being guided through that first experience, and then as you're going through each step, you've kind of lost where you are and you have no idea how to get back.

So they've deliberately put the Getting started page in the nav.

It's easy to access, it's easy to get back to if we need to.

That works well.

and we're also not bombarded with tooltip tours or a huge amount of things for us to go through here.

There's literally four steps with the progress bar that sits at the top here.

And I'm guessing if we didn't enter my website URL, then there may Only be three, But they're all fairly simple and straightforward.

The first one is open by default, which is nice.

the first one talks about the tag installation.

Then we got collaborating with my team.

Then we've got a, we can, we can take a tour and then we can use and then we can integrate other tools as well.

If we've got Google Analytics, it looks like we can go through the process, setting that up.

So let's start with tag installation.

I am going to go through this process on my own website.

As we go through this, I want to see how easy it is to do.

I mean you can see from the instructions themselves, and the way that this has been designed and laid out, we have three fairly clear steps to follow.

So we're literally just copying the code, pasting it into the head of every page.

We want to do some tracking and then we need to come back here, and verify the code has been installed correctly.

In theory, I think that's a really simple process to follow.

instead of having to highlight this, which risks me messing that up, we can just simply click copy over here we've got confirmation that that's been copied and then we can paste that into the header of my website.

I'm going to hit publish and then I'm going to come back here and just verify the installation to see if it's worked.

Now what will be interesting, is once we've completed this step, is this removed from the four step process and if so, then what happens to this notice about having a 15 day free trial?

I think it's important for users to know they're in a trial and how long's left because I think it motivates them to try and get some more from the product Okay, so I've published the changes on my own website.

One other thing to note here.

not a huge fan of this.

So we've now got a model that's popped up.

Welcome me to Content Square and asking me what we'd like to do today.

I think the last thing you want to do is get in people's way, especially when they're setting things up.

Surely this can wait or it can live elsewhere in the product.

So for this I'm just going to click other and click submit.

Let's get rid of him.

The other thing I was going to mention So I like the fact that there's a few other ways we can install as well.

We can install with the developers help and we can add their email address in here and they can help us set this thing up.

Or we can also use Google Tag Manager as well.

So there's multiple options there.

Anyway, I've added the code to the header of my site, hit publish.

So I'm going to come back now and I'm going to verify the installation.

So let's see if this has worked.

Okay, so in order to do this then we need to enter the URL of my website and then let's click verify.

Okay, so I've entered the URL, but it's telling me the URL is not valid because I think we're probably missing the HTTP which is a little bit annoying because it kind of slows us down a bit.

So instead of having users type that out, we could have the form that has HTTPs pre filled the form field and then that helps users get past this point much quicker.

So let's click verify.

So it looks like that's just going to take a few seconds and it's been successful.

So the data has now been captured on the website and we are ready to go with all of the tools.

Fantastic.

Let's click continue Okay, so it's reloaded the page and it's reminded us now that the free trial has started and I think they presented this Quite nicely.

just in a bullet list here I would like to see a little bit more imagery or illustrations, Anyway, I'm going to hit get started then and you can see we have the length of the trial has now moved from inside the tag installation.

It's now right at the top here now the time to value in a product like this is going to depend heavily on the traffic that you have to your website.

And given I've literally just set this up, it's unlikely that we're going to have any metrics right now to be able to review.

I did just want to take a really quick look at this home screen here.

So I think this is working really well.

So it looks like they've got their own AI built in here called Sense, where we can use it to help us surface specific insights.

I think that sits really well at the top of the page and if we need to get access to it we can by clicking on home.

I also think my website at a glance metrics are really good.

think having, you know, three or four metrics that sit at the top here, give me a quick overview of what I need to know.

And then below that we've got some suggestions as well.

and they're all really engaging.

So we can view replays, we can watch how users are interacting with the site, we can get an overview of user behavior and we can learn where and why people are dropping off.

So they're using the homepage really well to help users get set up, raise awareness of existing features and really just help, people get the most from the product.

Below that we've got integrations, so we can connect this to Google and Slack if we need to.

And then we've got other training material.

So I think all of these things combined on the homepage do a really good job of helping new users achieve some form of value, I think fair play to Hotjar.

They're doing quite a lot right here.

Anyway, I'm gonna leave it there.

Let me know what you guys think.

Cheers.