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How LearnWorlds embeds Hotjar in a company-wide workflow to optimize its website and product
George Palaigeorgiou is the co-founder and Chief Product Officer at LearnWorlds, a powerful learning management system enabling individuals and enterprises to train employees and associates, educate customers, and sell online courses to a diverse audience.
As CPO, George oversees the company’s product roadmap and strategy—a significant role, greatly amplified by integrating behavior analytics and product experience insights from Hotjar.
LearnWorlds 🤝 Hotjar: a summary
Requirements:
A way to focus on specific user segments in the complex and multifaceted elearning market
Greater insight into user behaviors on the website and in the product beyond Google Analytics data
A more comprehensive understanding of users' experiences, journeys, and actions
Solving the issue:
Hotjar Heatmaps and Recordings became part of LearnWorlds’ workflow, integrated into various stages of the user journey, and used strategically by marketers, product teams, and engineers
Outcomes and results:
Founded in 2014, LearnWorlds is a rapidly growing B2B learning management system (LMS) and course-creation platform, helping people and organizations create online schools and distribute learning content.
LearnWorlds boasts thousands of major clients, including Booking.com, Boeing, and Wagamama, as well as smaller businesses and creators, such as professional trainers and coaches. George describes the ideal LearnWorlds customer as “anyone and any business who needs to create and share knowledge products and distribute them to different audiences.”
An ever-widening market with room to grow
The elearning market that LearnWorlds operates in is a multifaceted and dynamic landscape. George says the business’s expansive and diverse audience leads to unclear personas and difficulty homing in on specific user segments and their needs.
But with so much interest in LearnWorlds’ offering, from solopreneurs to enterprise businesses, it's a welcome and invigorating challenge. Today, George and his team are focused on enhancing and broadening the LearnWorlds platform, equipping it with robust tools and comprehensive resources to make it the go-to learning solution for every audience segment—a goal that requires a deep understanding of current customers and prospects.
In 2018, four years after LearnWorlds was launched, George and his team found themselves faced with a big question: what were users actually doing on the LearnWorlds website and in their product?
We needed to know what was happening beyond Google Analytics and events in Google. We needed to understand our customers’ experience, their journey—which sections of a page they find useful, which buttons they click, and where their mouse moves. That’s why we started using Hotjar.
One platform to improve product and website experience
George says Hotjar’s user data helps the team understand how people behave on the LearnWorlds website and in the product. Every day, someone at LearnWorlds is using Hotjar, resulting in wins like:
(But more on those later.)
Within the company’s 140-strong workforce, product designers, web designers, and campaign managers rely on Hotjar the most.
When the platform first became part of LearnWorlds' workflow, it was simultaneously embedded in the product and creative web design teams’ workflows, so multiple functions could benefit. According to George, the value Hotjar would have for both teams was clear—but the business decision to introduce Hotjar wasn’t taken lightly.
“We have a huge platform with tons of editing tools,” George explains. “So it wasn’t a simple process of adding Hotjar and seeing what happened.”
Then, there was the added risk of teams measuring and analyzing the wrong data. From day one of using Hotjar, the business focused on measuring actionable metrics.
We’re using Hotjar for very measurable things, not just for a glimpse of what is happening. Hotjar is connected with results and actions.
So, LearnWorlds developed strategies and gave teams guidelines on when to use Hotjar—for new releases, web pages, and campaigns—and what to use it for: viewing heatmaps and session recordings on key pages to find actionable, user-led insights.
Continuous discovery as a driver for success
George explains that each group of people represents a different ‘layer’ of Hotjar usage at a different stage of the product life cycle or marketing campaign—an ideal fit for the LearnWorlds way of working.
As a successful SaaS business, LearnWorlds prides itself on what George calls an ‘exploratory mentality’. For the LearnWorlds team, this means not simply running a campaign, reviewing the final report, and trying something different next time based on the results.
“We’re always switched on to what’s happening,” says George. “On the day we release a product update or new page, the campaign manager or UI designer is obliged to understand performance and iterate and improve results every day.”
Hotjar has proven to be the ideal platform to aid this process of continuous discovery.
3 ways LearnWorlds uses Hotjar to build a better product
Hotjar—specifically the platform’s Observe tools, Heatmaps and Recordings—is an important part of LearnWorlds’ carefully constructed tech stack: an ecosystem of complementary tools gathering valuable insights to grow the business.
Heatmaps and session recordings work together to give George and his team the user data they need to build a people-centric product and provide a fantastic user experience.
Strategically brought into various stages of the user journey (and seamlessly integrated with two crucial product analytics tools, Google Analytics and Mixpanel), Hotjar helps LearnWorlds understand how its users really behave and prioritize user-led optimizations based on these findings.
One example of just how fully integrated Hotjar has become? The Business Intelligence (BI) team at LearnWorlds creates various dashboards to track key insights and metrics. “Just a few weeks ago, we were discussing how we could bring data from Hotjar inside our dashboards!” says George.
Here’s how LearnWorlds uses Hotjar to grow by giving users what they want and need.
1. Heatmaps + Recordings to validate marketing campaign hypotheses
LearnWorlds hosts multiple webinars—which means a whole lot of landing pages. “The conversion rate of a landing page is always a huge issue for us,” says George. “We’ve seen conversion rates as low as 12%.”
When a conversion rate is this unexpectedly low, the team formulates a hypothesis and uses Hotjar to validate it, create high-converting landing pages, and generate leads.
We turned to Hotjar Heatmaps and Recordings to see what’s happening—where people scroll and click. Our low conversion rate was due to a simple issue with the landing page design. We were placing the real value too far down, and the first part of the page didn't address their needs, so the people scrolling further down the page were converting more. A quick fix increased our conversion rate from 12% to 30%.
The team took this valuable insight to create a ‘template’ for an information hierarchy that would be effective for every webinar landing page moving forward.
Mark Bradley, Creative Director at LearnWorlds, adds that the powerful combination of Heatmaps and Recordings has made page optimization a breeze for him and his team.
“We use recordings and heatmaps with the team to look at journeys, depth of page scroll, and mobile vs. desktop behaviors. Hotjar always throws up unexpected results we use to optimize our pages.”
Hotjar Heatmaps: a simple solution for a homepage that converts
The LearnWorlds team used insights from Hotjar to redesign their homepage hero, simplifying elements, giving the main CTA more prominence, and removing the email sign-up box.
Heatmaps revealed where site visitors click, move, and scroll—insights that enabled LearnWorlds’ marketing team to increase the visibility of elements users interact with and remove ones they ignore.
“One of the standout features of Hotjar is its heatmaps. Being able to visualize exactly where users are clicking, tapping, or scrolling on our landing pages has been eye-opening. This data has enabled us to spot potential pain points or bottlenecks in the user journey, leading to swift improvements and increased conversions.”
Vasiliki Michou
Integrated Campaigns Team Lead at LearnWorlds
2. Recordings for a full website redesign
In November 2022, LearnWorlds undertook a complete website redesign. “You’re always anxious because you don’t know whether it’ll work,” says George. “Although we’d done some initial research and testing, that isn’t always enough.”
As with most major projects, things got off to a rocky start.
Google Analytics revealed some of the new website’s user paths were broken—visitors weren’t moving as deep into the site as they had on the old website. But the team didn’t know why. So, they looked at session recordings via Hotjar’s Google Analytics integration to complement their quantitative data with qualitative insights.
Recordings uncovered a navigational element that wasn’t working as expected: for some reason, users hovered over the element, but didn’t click. The problem? Users couldn’t see the component was clickable because the design didn’t make it clear enough.
George and his team found at least four other clickable elements with the same issue, which they immediately redesigned.
With this simple fix, the journeys were even more effective than in the past: “We’re talking about improvements in free trial conversion rates of more than 0.5%,” says George. “We have massive traffic on our website, so that’s a great improvement for us.”
You can probably speculate about why something is working. But when you have Hotjar, and you’re seeing a recording of exactly where they stop, where they put their mouse, and what they click—it's a huge difference to make changes based on that.
3. Recordings to spot and fix bugs in the product
LearnWorlds’ biggest Hotjar-led changes have happened not on the website but in the product. As with any product, LearnWorlds has run into several problems over the years, from engineering bugs to usability issues.
After several months of planning, George and his team were ready to release a brand-new feature, User Roles—a big deal for LearnWorlds, because this feature was created to attract higher-tier clients.
But, the feature had a problem: “By reviewing recordings of users’ mouse movements, we realized we had set up the menu and the first screen in such a way that people didn't understand what they were seeing and what they had to do,” George explains. To the team’s disappointment, only 1.8% of users were navigating to and interacting with the new feature—a far cry from the 10% they were hoping for.
The team turned to Hotjar Recordings for answers, discovering “several layers of problems” in the product—from engineering and navigational issues, to a design flaw on the very first screen, which featured a problematic placeholder image confusing users.
Once the necessary changes were made, the percentage of users interacting with the new feature increased from 1.8% to almost 9%—significantly closer to the goal.
Hotjar: one crucial part of a product growth machine
These are just a few examples of how LearnWorlds uses Hotjar today, but there are many more ongoing use cases depending on the team and the stage of the product life cycle.
Marketers use Hotjar for A/B testing and to compare user behavior on the control and variant, helping them pick a champion
Engineers use Hotjar to find and fix software bugs that impact UX and conversions
Product teams use Hotjar to monitor user sentiment toward new releases and make changes accordingly
Hotjar is a valuable asset in the company for many different reasons. For us, there’s different value in having the raw Hotjar data, an interpretation of the data, conclusions from the data, actions from the data, and the validation of our hypotheses. Hotjar provides tools that are invaluable in these five different stages.
LearnWorlds doesn’t view Hotjar as a separate, standalone platform with data that exists in a silo. Rather, it forms part of LearnWorlds’ own ecosystem of complementary product experience insights tools, touching multiple teams at every stage of the funnel, and impacting many important decisions. In George’s words, “It’s not just about viewing a recording. It’s about sharing that recording link with a note to corroborate an issue we’re actively monitoring.”
As a critical part of LearnWorlds’ workflow and strategy, Hotjar is fully embedded in the business, helping it achieve its ultimate goal: providing every user with an LMS solution that truly delights them.
Grow your business by being customer-obsessed
LearnWorlds increased landing page conversion rates and new feature adoption with Hotjar Recordings and Heatmaps—and that’s just half of what Hotjar can do. Sign up for a free account to discover more invaluable insights with Surveys, Feedback, and Interviews. What are you waiting for?