How to get the most out of Hotjar’s Highlights as a product team

If you’re a product manager, researcher, or product marketer, a crucial part of your role is discovering and sharing user insights with your team. As a key member of a product team, you need to ensure that users are engaging with your product regularly—performing actions that range from opting in for an offer to making a purchase to posting a comment on a blog.

But, as any product team member knows, it’s a time-consuming task to manually share insights, one by one, with every person who needs to see them. And on top of that, you have to keep track of the comments coming in from every direction. 

Sometimes, it feels like the process of continuous discovery hinders your workflow instead of streamlining it.

Enter Hotjar.

Why Hotjar is the ultimate platform for product teams

As a product experience (PX) analytics platform, Hotjar enables you to collect qualitative data (that is, data that is not based on statistics). Heatmaps, feedback, session recordings, surveys, and more are all on the table with Hotjar.

These tools aren't new. However, most platforms require product teams to rely on a variety of services to acquire the same functionality Hotjar provides as a standalone platform.

All product experience analytics tools are useful for locating study subjects and gathering data. But Hotjar also gives you the ability to collect direct feedback from users, situating user behavior within a larger context. This means when using Hotjar, you'll have all the data you need—both quantitative and qualitative—in one location. Best of all, this data is instantly accessible to anyone from your team.

Hotjar Highlights is the latest in a long list of features designed to further simplify data collection and analysis—especially for product team members.

Let’s take a closer look at what makes Highlights so valuable for product teams. 

How Highlights helps facilitate collaboration

Highlights is a Hotjar feature that replaces the need for the time-consuming manual activities that come with finding and sharing insights, making product team collaboration easier than ever.

You already know what Hotjar does: with an array of tools, such as heatmaps, recordings, surveys, and a feedback widget, the Hotjar platform is a product experience insights solution providing behavior analytics and feedback data that helps you empathize with and understand your customers.

The data and insights you obtain from more traditional product and web analytics tools, such as Google Analytics or Mixpanel, are complemented by those you get from Hotjar. This allows you to draw connections between what's happening on your site or in your product and why.

But how does Highlights improve your overall Hotjar experience? Let’s look at two important ways:

1. Highlights helps product teams pull the most relevant Hotjar insights

For starters, Highlights gives teams a way to find and organize the most important user insights, separating these nuggets of gold from the noise. You can focus on the most significant aspects of a heatmap or recording, drawing attention to the user behavior that stands out the most.

We’re also continuously introducing improvements that make the feature even more useful for product teams. Now, you can mark a highlight as “resolved” to keep your list uncluttered and set a filter to view either resolved or open highlights. You can also create a heatmap highlight that displays the number and percentage of clicks on a specific element on your site.

How does this help your product team?

• If you’ve created a highlight of a bug and shared it with the engineering team for a fix, you can now mark the highlight as “resolved” once the issue has been worked on, so it’s removed from your list

• If you notice visitors trying to click on an unclickable site element, you can create a highlight that contains the click data of the user behavior and share it with your team, allowing you to quickly make the right decisions based on your users’ needs

2. Highlights makes it easier to spot product opportunities

Because your highlights are kept in a central location, it’s much easier to identify patterns, examine particular user behaviors, and make continuous discovery a seamless part of your team’s workflow.

This feature is unique because it enables a more analytical, research-based approach to work that needs to be done. In other words, while most platforms place an emphasis on locating insights, Hotjar’s Highlights helps you group and analyze them, too.

Heatmaps, recordings, and Highlights: a perfect match

If you’re already a Hotjar user, you know that heatmaps and recordings are crucial tools to gather invaluable data about your customers. But whether you’re capturing 100% of the sessions on your site or just a sample, you know that analyzing all this data takes time.

Luckily, Highlights specifically works with these two tools to give product teams a deeper understanding of the user behavior being viewed.

How Highlights works with Hotjar Heatmaps 

Using color-coded values, a heatmap shows user behavior in a visually appealing way. Heatmaps are critical in determining whether or not a website or product page is performing the way it should.

Heatmaps let you test out different layouts for buttons and other features on your website to see which ones work best—and which don't work at all. This way, you can better understand how to engage and retain your customers by prioritizing tasks that maximize customer value.

One great feature of heatmaps is that each device type (desktop, tablet, and mobile) generates its own heatmaps. By comparing the heatmaps on different devices, you can determine whether any of your layouts are poorly optimized. In this way, you can visualize and understand otherwise complicated data.

But when you and your team are dealing with data from hundreds of pages, it can be difficult to find and pull out the most important results. By creating a highlight of a standout heatmap element, product teams can ensure all the most meaningful data is stored in a safe place, ready to be reviewed by key stakeholders. 

When you create a highlight, you can download a PNG image of your insight. You can use this image in a presentation or share it directly with the people who need to see it. 

Adding the highlight to a presentation allows product teams to create a concrete visualization of the problem—one stakeholders can’t ignore. And this takes the difficulty out of convincing the right people of the product updates that need to be prioritized.

How Highlights works with Hotjar Recordings

Renderings of actual activities carried out by site users as they navigate a website are called session recordings. The movement of the mouse, as well as clicks, taps, and scrolling, are all captured in recordings of desktop computers and mobile devices.

Conversion rates are improved by viewing session recordings to see how users interact with a website, then fixing any problems and making necessary changes to optimize the user experience (UX). 

In Hotjar Recordings, the tedious tasks of favoriting, manually labeling, and filtering recordings by comment have been replaced with Highlights, saving product teams valuable time.

Now, you and your team have an effortless way to locate highlights of important user behaviors: each one is kept in a single, centralized location.

Instead of manually adding tags to your most valuable recordings, simply highlight a recording and apply a label to it. These pre-existing labels are quick to recognize, enabling product teams to sort through and find the most relevant recordings at a glance.

Save and organize highlights and group them into collections to make it even easier to locate certain insights. With insights made more accessible, you’ll effectively reduce product research silos and make an experiment's results more readily available to your team.

5 more ways product teams use Highlights

So how should you make the most of Highlights as a member of a product team?

There are multiple ways Highlights can save you and your team time and effort. Let’s take an in-depth look at some of the benefits for product teams.

1. Spot issues before they become serious

Have you ever discovered a flaw in your product? Perhaps your users aren’t following the path you expect them to, or an element on a page is causing frustration. With Hotjar, you can generate a heatmap or record a highlight of the issue in minutes, then tag in the right people to help you work on a solution. Finding product opportunities doesn’t get any easier than that!

2. Build a strong case for product improvements

Are you seeing several instances of users running into problems with your product? Create a collection of highlights to form a clear picture of the unwanted user behavior and use it to support your case for product improvements. By seeing the behavior in action, stakeholders are far more likely to buy into your proposed changes. 

3. Loop in all the right people

Add comments to highlights explaining the user behavior you're observing, and @mention a colleague to bring them into the conversation and get a second (or third!) opinion. Regular feedback from your extended team puts you on the right track from the get-go.

4. Give more context to user behaviors

Viewing recordings without context doesn’t paint a clear picture of your PX. You’ll need to position your findings in a way that teammates can quickly understand and respond to. 

Using Highlights as a product team allows you to group and classify behaviors in a few ways: choose labels to describe the action in question and add additional comments to explain things more clearly. This makes it possible to comprehend the problem at a glance, and as a result, your team will be able to solve the issue more successfully.

5. Find what you need—fast

We’ve already spoken about collections. But we didn’t mention that you can sort and filter your collections by date, author, source, or label to locate the information you need quickly. No more painstakingly sorting through droves of data—your team will have instant access to the insights that are most important to them.

Set your product team on the right path

Thanks to Highlights, your job as a product manager, marketer, researcher, or analyst is much more streamlined. Now, you can spend time on tasks that actually matter, like prioritizing your backlog with product proposals guaranteed to make a significant difference.

Recordings and Heatmaps have always been two of Hotjar’s most valuable tools—and the Highlights feature makes it easier to collect meaningful insights in one place, allowing for effortless cross-functional collaboration among product team members. 

Use Highlights as a product team to start:

• Extracting and storing essential insights

• Concentrating on the most engaging details

• Creating valuable snippets of user behavior

• Curating easily accessible groups of related insights

• Keeping insights in one convenient location

These incredible benefits are within your reach with Hotjar. What are you waiting for?