User interviews come to Hotjar

You know the curse of knowledge?

No, it’s not Indiana Jones’ latest adventure—your working day is hopefully free from snake pits and spike traps (if that does sound like a typical day, consider a career change).

The curse of knowledge means you know too much. You know so much about your product—its benefits, features, and flows—that it’s impossible to step back and experience it like your users. You’re too far down the product hole. 

This is why we built Hotjar. To give people the tools they need to get out of that hole, and into their users’ shoes.

With that in mind, we’ve got some exciting news to share…

Say hi to Hotjar Engage

Hotjar has acquired PingPong, a user-testing and interviews platform.

We’re calling it Hotjar Engage, and it’ll sit alongside our Ask and Observe products, giving our customers access to an extra serving of empathy in the product development process.

As of today, Engage is in open beta and available to everyone. Engage lets you easily schedule, run, record, and share user interviews. You can either invite your own users, or access Hotjar's pool of more than 175,000 testers—so you’ll always be able to find the right people to test your product.

Scheduling user interviews is as simple as sharing a link; Engage syncs with your calendar so there’s no back and forth trying to find a suitable time. No need for third-party video tools either, as everything happens inside the platform (though you can use an external tool like Zoom if you prefer).

It’s much more than just a video call, too—you can highlight key moments with instant markers, add notes as you go, and easily create clips to share with your team. You can also invite team members to observe live sessions, and a transcription of the call will be generated automatically.

We’re extra excited about this new offering—and we hope you are, too—because we know the added value user testing and interviews bring to the product development process. This, after all, is how our own product teams work.

Get into your users’ shoes

Imagine your team just published a snazzy new homepage. You’re all convinced it’s a winner—with its benefit-driven headlines, eye-catching images, and compelling call to action.

But according to Hotjar’s Heatmaps, the signup button isn’t getting as many clicks as you were hoping for. Even though you begrudgingly added ‘IT’S FREE!’ (exclamation mark included) to make the copy ‘pop’ more.

Maybe there are some on-page bugs hurting conversions? You grab yourself a coffee and switch to Recordings to see live playbacks of real visitors interacting with the page. All’s well—the images are loading, the animation is playing, the links are working. Hmm.

You grab another coffee (maybe switch to decaf?) and check the exit survey—the one that asks people leaving the page what they thought was missing. The responses are eye-opening: many people don’t understand what your product does. It seems your benefit-driven copy has driven up to jargon junction, and is now hurtling towards the cliff of confusion—possibly due to the inclusion of lines like ‘optimize your leverage.’

So you’ve discovered you need to tweak your messaging. But how? To what? Like Indy searching for an ancient artifact, you’ll need to dig a little deeper.

It’s time to Engage

To find some answers, you need some face-to-face feedback. So you pop back into Hotjar (but wisely decide against a third coffee) and schedule a few interviews—five to seven are usually enough to uncover most usability issues.

While your testers browse your homepage, you ask questions like: what’s appealing? Does anything put you off? Is anything confusing? Would you have enough information to sign up? If not, what’s missing?

After a few interviews, you’ll probably see some common themes emerge. Maybe you need to clarify how your product’s free plan works. Maybe people aren’t sure why they should choose you over your competitors. Maybe your Indiana Jones references aren’t hitting the mark. *Gulp.*

Whatever the case, the insights you glean will help point your page in the right direction. You’ll now be able to create a list of improvements to implement. And the interview recordings will come in handy when it comes to explaining your decisions and getting buy-in for your ideas.

No insights are more powerful than those straight from the horse’s mouth.

Stay tuned for more soon

This is just one of many exciting additions we have planned for Hotjar, driven by our vision of inspiring change through empathy. Because we believe everyone doing business online should have the tools to understand their users, and create experiences they’ll love.