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Hotjar’s Highlights: what is it and what does it do?

With Highlights, a Hotjar feature that facilitates and simplifies team collaboration, teams can easily sort through, categorize, and share valuable insights.

Last updated

14 Jul 2022

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7 min

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Hotjar Features Spotlight: What Is Hotjar Highlights?

Have you ever had to manually transfer the product experience (PX) insights you’ve discovered into other third-party tools? If the answer is yes, you know it can be an incredibly time-consuming task.

Say you’re a product manager viewing a session recording, and you’ve discovered that an element on your page, such as a checkout button, isn’t working as it should. Or maybe your heatmap has revealed a fascinating insight that you need to discuss with your team ASAP. How do you share your findings?

You might list your discoveries on a lengthy spreadsheet, or you could alert each product team member on a messaging app like Slack. But doing all that manual work requires a time commitment that many busy teams can’t make—and critical insights may get lost along the way.

But here’s the good news: the Hotjar Highlights feature removes any friction from the process of sharing insights.

Intrigued to know more? Let’s take a closer look at what makes Highlights such a game-changing feature. 

Get on top of user experience

With Hotjar’s Highlights, you don’t just watch what your visitors see and do—you also get a deeper understanding of the context.

What is Hotjar Highlights?

You already know that product experience insights tools like Hotjar help you understand how users interact with your site and collect insights on user behavior. But copy-pasting the data you’ve discovered from one platform to another is not a valuable use of your time. 

The Highlights feature makes sharing insights a part of your workflow, not a disruption to it. How, exactly, does it work? Highlights enables you to take fragments from your session recordings and Hotjar Heatmaps and organize them into easily accessible collections where they can be viewed, discussed, and analyzed with the rest of your team. 

With these insights compiled in one location, your team will have an easier time seeing trends, validating assumptions, and brilliantly prioritizing tasks.

Highlights makes it easier to:

  • Improve coordination and communication with team members

  • Share your needle-moving insights in one central place

  • Put your users at the center of all your decisions with ease

When to use Highlights

Highlights is built to seamlessly slot into your team’s daily workflow. Use Highlights to eliminate the need for third-party tools: save and organize your highlights in a single location directly within Hotjar—you don’t even have to leave the platform to do it!

Hotjar’s Highlights what is it and what does it do

What’s more, you can create Hotjar Collections to separate and organize your findings. This centralized location gives you easy access to your most valuable insights as well as a place where your team can readily locate them. 

Here, you can also:

  • Create new collections

  • Add new highlights to existing collections

  • Share entire collections with other members of your team

Highlights collections

It’s incredibly easy to group and label your most fascinating findings. Say you want to create a highlight of an interesting user behavior you stumble across while viewing Hotjar Recordings. In that case, all you have to do is mark the behavior with the pre-existing label that most accurately describes the action you’re observing:

  • 🐞 - Bug

  • ⚠️ - UI/UX issue

  • 😕 - Confusion 

  • 😡 - Frustration

  • 🎉 - Success

  • 🏆 - Conversion

Using these easily identifiable labels makes it simpler to organize your highlights, allowing you to sort them and grasp their meaning at a glance.

And if you want to provide even more context about a behavior before sharing it with your team, you can also include a comment about the action you’ve found.

highlights comment

This way, your team has everything they need to know to get stuck into analyzing your highlights.

Why Highlights is important for teams

The best way to convince your team of the right user-led improvements to make next is to show them how users interact with your product or website. But at the same time, drowning your teammates in data might not be the best way to get your point across. 

The Highlights feature helps you wrap up the best of your insights with a neat little bow, ready to be presented to the people who need to see them. 

Here are five major benefits of Highlights:

1. Get buy-in for your ideas

Ever been faced with a reluctant stakeholder who isn’t quite on board with your next steps? Highlights filters out the noise of unnecessary data to present a persuasive case strengthened by snippets of your most meaningful insights. 

2. Keep your customers happy

By regularly reviewing critical product experience insights, teams will learn more about how their consumers use their product. It’s possible to improve customer happiness and user experience (UX) by focusing on your product experience, and this, in turn, leads to a rise in retention rates.

3. See how users behave in your product

Hotjar’s Heatmaps and Recordings are essential tools to understand product experience—but they also provide a lot of data, and some are more relevant than others. Highlights helps you sort through your heatmap and recordings data and gather concrete, visual evidence of instances where your product isn’t working the way it should, helping you build your case.

4. Gain a deeper understanding of your product

If you’re a member of a product team, a marketer, or a researcher, you’ve almost certainly asked yourself what makes your customers come to your website or product and which elements of it force them to act. If you're looking for an in-depth understanding of your product, let Hotjar’s Highlights take you outside of typical analytics methods to show users in action and in the wild.

5. Collaborate effectively with your team

Another benefit of the Hotjar Highlight feature is that it reduces the research silos that might exist in your team. Highlights makes the results of an experiment more readily available to your entire team, preventing them from repeating work that has already been done.

All these incredible benefits—and you don’t even need to get your developers and technical teams involved! There’s no steep learning curve required to get the most out of Highlights. It’s super simple to learn and set up your first collection yourself, and getting your team on board should be a breeze.

Who Highlights is for

The Highlights feature is for any team that needs to analyze behavioral data, draw meaningful conclusions, and effectively coordinate with different team members. It’s for teams who truly believe in putting their users first and making their customers the center of every decision. If that sounds like you, don’t hesitate to see how Highlights can streamline your workflow and get your entire team on the same page.

An added bonus is that teams of any size can use Hotjar and the Highlights feature, regardless of whether you operate a lean startup with a limited budget or a multinational corporation with hundreds of web pages. Highlights is for you if you want to:

  • Gain actual, first-hand insight into what consumers are interested in, leaning toward, or ignoring

  • Determine the points in the customer's journey where they become frustrated, confused, or unable to proceed—and then depart

  • Investigate the performance of certain pages and parts to learn exactly what it is that your customers want and care about most

  • Use all this information to inform your strategies moving forward

And it all starts here, with Hotjar.

Gather and group your most meaningful insights

Hotjar’s Highlights feature gives you a fast, effective way to sort through mountains of data and share valuable insights with everyone who matters.

Get started with Hotjar Highlights

Learn more about your customers and prioritize your backlog brilliantly by signing up for a free Hotjar trial now. The best part? Highlights is available on all plans: Basic, Plus, Business, and Scale. You and your team will have a stronger level of confidence in the decisions you make about your product, allowing you to prioritize and put into action the improvements that will have the most significant impact.

So what are you waiting for? Create your first Highlight to home in on the fascinating insights available to you so you can verify assumptions, plan your next steps, and persuade stakeholders with customer-led insights that can’t be ignored.

Sign up for a free trial with Hotjar today. It only takes a few minutes, and it’s fully compliant with the GDPR and the CCPA.

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