Hotjar’s Dashboards: what they are and why you should use them

Do you want to know if users are having trouble navigating your newly designed website? There is no shortage of analytics sources you can use to obtain an overview of the user experience (UX). Then you have Hotjar’s user behavior insights if you prefer to get more granular.

In reality, though, you’re not fetching data for a single parameter on any given day. And you have pretty limited time to sift through all the insights before you get to the one that drives you to make a clear and logical decision.

What if you could access all the user metrics that matter to your product or website in one place? There would no longer be the need to switch between multiple tools or platforms—and that would considerably ease your workflow, right?

This is exactly what the new Hotjar Dashboards bring to the table. In this guide, we will explore this improved feature, what it does, and how you can benefit from it now that it’s part of the Hotjar platform.

What is the new Dashboards?

Hotjar’s new Dashboards is a hub of widgets displaying user metrics for faster analysis. It takes key sessions and user behavior data available on the Hotjar platform and presents them in charts and graphs. This aggregate, visual view lets you find actionable insights without having to trawl through data while switching between multiple analytics sources.

Access quantitative and qualitative data that matters to your product or website in one place. For now, Dashboards give you a snapshot of the following user metrics:

• Key sessions including top pages, rage click & U-turn trends, new vs returning user sessions, and more

• User behavior data from internal tools, such as Hotjar Feedback, Heatmaps, and Recordings

For fast-paced teams who don’t have the time to sift through data before every decision, Dashboards showcase high-level user behavior to help you spot problems before they develop and take opportunities as soon as they arise, with no extra time and external integrations needed.

What Hotjar Dashboards do and how to make the most of them

When you create a Hotjar account, our Observe or Ask (or both!) tools are immediately available to you. Your Dashboards bring together user behavior insights from these tools, so you can uncover more than what traditional analytics tells you. 

This feature paints the big picture by showing you quantitative data at a glance. As you identify trends on your Dashboards, you can zoom in on the qualitative insights—that is, viewing related heatmaps and recordings—to validate your assumptions.

By connecting the dots between demographics and user behavior analysis, Dashboards fill vital gaps in your data. Here’s how it allows you to understand your product or website performance with speed, simplicity, and ease:

Display key metrics in one place

Hotjar Dashboards let you see what’s happening in your product on one page. 

For instance, a product team has just rolled out an entire website redesign. They want to see whether users are experiencing unexpected issues, so they monitor the rage clicks, U-turns, device and browser types, average session time, and bounce rate. This visual overview informs them whether the new design is bringing about a better user experience.

Enable filtering for spotting patterns and comparing data

The filtering option boosts your ability to analyze the impact of product changes or identify your most profitable customer segments.

Say you want to pulse check how users use your product and if the work you’ve done has led to any positive trend. In your Dashboards, you can compare the product's top pages, check whether user sentiment has improved, or find out whether frustration and confusion signals like rage clicks and U-turns have been reduced. You can then filter and compare this analysis across segments to gain a richer insight into the users that matter most to you.

Provide sentiment analysis to deepen insights

Dashboards can take you straight to the relevant user data via Hotjar Heatmaps and Recordings and reveal the reasons behind the numbers.

Consider a product team in a Software as a Service (SaaS) company launching a brand-new product. The product manager uses the filters on the new Dashboards to see how users who convert compare to those who don’t. The initial analysis shows that users who don’t convert are leaving more negative feedback, prompting the product manager to watch the recordings and understand where they’re experiencing problems and why. 

Drive teams to act or respond fast 

Last but not least, Dashboards enable you to quantify users who might be experiencing an issue or exposed to a new product opportunity, informing your next steps.

For example, you watch an instance via Hotjar Recordings where a user rage clicks on a button. You can check the rage click widget on your Dashboards to understand whether this was a one-time issue or a more general one that many more users are facing and how the trend has evolved.

Who can benefit from the new Dashboards?

Product teams make a host of decisions daily. They need to immediately act on any problems or possibilities to create a great user experience, prevent churn, and drive business growth. But sometimes, behind this noble pursuit hides a less-than-ideal workflow. Teams can get bogged down by the frequent switch between analytics tools to capture product experience insights.

Hotjar Dashboards connects the dots between quantitative and qualitative data, so you can access all user metrics that matter to your team in one place. It lightens the load and fills the gaps that usually crop up when you generate data from various sources. As a result, you find more accurate insights, faster. 

How can product teams drive real business outcomes through the new Dashboards? Let us count the ways:

• Discover issues and prioritize fixes. Get an aggregate, visual view of session data and dig deeper into the behavior behind it by checking the relevant behavior insights within the same platform.

• Reduce assumptions and increase confidence. After spotting a problem in a recording or noticing an issue on a heatmap, you can navigate toward your dashboard to see if the event is isolated or a general case. This functionality helps you reduce your assumptions with hard data.

• Get buy-in and align with the team. Prove that a certain problem occurs for many users so that all team members are on the same page regarding the fixes to be made.

Discover meaningful user insights instantly

When you sign up for any of our paid plans, you get free, automatic access to your Hotjar Dashboards. Right away, you can start making your team workflow more efficient and getting more accurate insights for scaling your product. 

Look up the plan that fits your needs, from basic to full-feature capabilities, and let’s have you set up.