It’s imperative, however, to understand that the journey you are about to embark on starts with user testing, and ends with an improved customer experience. The improvements you make could be the key to brand growth that you have been missing all along. 

Download Free: Usability Testing Guide

So, let’s dive right in. This article will cover: 

• What is user testing? 
• Three steps to conducting impactful user testing
• How well-run user testing can drive conversions (with examples)

What is user testing?

User testing is a pillar of customer research and conversion rate optimization, leveraged to reveal usability issues on your eCommerce site. Properly implemented, it can open your eyes to key pain points of your users and a host of quick wins to improve their experience. 

User testing can show you more than usability issues

While user testing is an excellent application of user research, you often already know general behavioral metrics like time on page, exit rates, etc., before you begin to test. The key is to expand your collection and include the context of quantitative and demographic data. 

By creating a more holistic picture of your customer’s journey, you will uncover usability issues and overall expectations that shoppers have for your brand. 

User testing vs. user research

While the terms user testing and user research are used interchangeably, user research is an umbrella term for various research methods. This includes interviews, surveys, focus groups, and more. User testing is just one branch of the user research tree.

Successful user testing can be highly effective in identifying customer pain points and sticking areas of your website. But, everything hinges on the way you screen and select users for tests. 
So, that’s how the steps to conducting impactful website usability testing start.

Three steps to conducting impactful user testing

Step 1: Be selective about your panel

Connecting with the right users for your test will offer not only better data but contextual clues and insights to indicate consumer motives, not just performance. 

To gather accurate test results and data, start by identifying your core audience demographics. Sift through your website’s data to collect sample data on age, gender, and location to understand on a base level who is converting and who is not. 

Use this demographic data as the first selection criteria for your panel. Most user testing services allow you to screen for gender, age, and location simply by checking a few boxes. 

Now, take things a step further to make sure you encompass more unique characteristics of your audience. To do so, you will need to craft some thoughtful screener questions. The answers to questions will help you identify psychographics that match your unique audience profile at a deeper level. 

For example, what is your approach to shopping for home decor?

• I go low stress. I prefer to make easy decisions from a few options to save myself time. [Reject]
• I take my time. I aim to find the best deal at the lowest price. [Reject]
• I take my time. I aim to find the best product, and I prioritize quality over cost. [Accept]
• None of the above. [Reject]

In order to convert more website visitors into buyers for clients, start with a clean slate and target consumers who have not already learned the nuances of a site. This way, the user isn’t naturally overlooking pain points that they learned to navigate in previous visits. 

To do this, screen for potential user testers who have heard of your in-market competitors but don’t know your site or brand. 

Here’s an example: 

Which of the following brands have you purchased from?

• Competitor 1 [Accept]
• Competitor 2 [Accept]
• Your site [Reject]
• Competitor 3 [Accept]
• Fake company [Reject]
• None of the above [Reject]

After you screen for the most critical criteria, you also want to consider how users shop and their intent to purchase. Avoid users who have no intention to purchase, and consider screening for panelists who shop online at least once a week. 

In summary, as you select your user testing panel: 

• Screen for your unique audience demographics
• Layer on psychographic questions that align with your ideal user profile
• Avoid users that know too much about your site/brand
• Talk to users with an intent to purchase

Now, you are on your way to a successful user test, but this is where the real work begins.

Step 2: Ask the right questions to surface meaningful feedback

The thoughts and responses you get from user testing make the efforts worthwhile. So how do you make sure you are surfacing meaningful feedback? It’s all about the questions you ask and what you task your carefully selected panel with. 

While specifics will change based on your brand and goals, below are a few guidelines to help navigate the creation of your user testing questions. 

1. Avoid biasing your audience by forming an intro question that does not prime users with the purpose of the site. Here is an example: Imagine you are browsing for home decor online. Without leaving the homepage, describe in your own words what you think you can do on this site? What would you come here for? 

2. Outline key pain points from data you already analyzed to help structure your questions and tasks. This will reveal why users behave the way they do on your site. For example, if you notice from the data that users are most often abandoning the product page, you may want to focus some of your questions on what content is working there and what isn’t. For example, what, if anything, is missing from the product page that you would need to know in order to complete your purchase?

3. The first few minutes of a user testing session are typically mimicking the most ‘natural’ interaction someone has with your site. A frequent mistake is being too narrow-minded or specific with tests and losing the user’s natural behavior. To avoid this, use a time limit and after a few priming questions, start testing with “Explore this website in whatever area interests you. Spend no more than a few minutes on this task.” This produces close-to-natural behavior that will show you what’s grabbing user attention and how they would organically behave on-site before moving to the next task. 
4. Before launching user testing, always run a pilot (a small-scale, preliminary test) to uncover unclear questions and areas for improvement in your test. 
5. Don’t run too many tests. A study has found that roughly five users per usability test uncover about 80% of usability issues.

Review these guidelines with each user test you conduct. Even trained researchers review the basics continually during their work and studies. Learning to remove bias, set learning goals, and avoid unnatural behavior will build higher impact user tests.

Launching a pilot test, and moving in small, iterative testing cycles means you’re never taking risks by investing precious resources into a potentially faulty test. 

Now is the most exciting part of the user testing process: receiving and analyzing results to create winning strategies for your brand. 

Step 3: Analyze and leverage your data for winning strategies

Though exciting, analyzing and leveraging the data you collect from user tests can be an intimidating item on your to-do list. 

Your tests have likely pointed out a host of usability issues and maybe even some customer experience pain points. Below you’ll learn how to sift through data, prioritize issues, and come up with winning A/B tests and strategies to improve your site.

Download Free: Usability Testing Guide

Analyze the results

As a starting point for analyzing the results of your test, always return to your objectives. Remind yourself of the goals you had for the tests, and pick out insights and feedback that will get you closer to those goals. 

Then, while you sift through the results of your user tests, remember that the suggestions made should not be taken literally. While feedback from consumers is valuable, it does not often address the root of the issue. Gather the insights efficiently so you can come up with a solution that meets the needs of the customer and the business, not the self-identified frustration or problem. 

Another technique to better understand the sentiment of users is to pull quotes from the testing sessions. This can help identify areas of misunderstanding, i.e. when the user says they are going to do one thing but gets lost along the way. Direct quotes also offer insight into user expectations that are not being met.

Always remember as you go through results to take the user ratings with a grain of salt. For example, some users will rate a website as highly navigable even though they took much more time than ideal for reaching the desired result. This could be because they think they failed at navigating the site when really the site failed them. To do this, pay attention to how long tasks take. 

Identify improvement areas

Once you have analyzed your user testing results, it’s crucial to prioritize the issues to be addressed. You first want to solve the most common or frequently encountered problems and then move to minor or specific glitches. 

One way to do this is to create a spreadsheet of all the identified problems. You can organize the document based on the impact the issue had on user experience and the frequency at which it occurred. That sheet becomes a prioritized checklist for optimization. 

Run A/B tests with VWO

With a prioritized checklist in place, it’s time to create solid hypotheses around the identified problems and start running experiments. VWO’s A/B testing tool enables you to optimize key business metrics by figuring out visitor behavior, test ideas, and engagement across the users’ entire journey.

Ubisoft increased its lead generation by 12% utilizing A/B testing. Their team collected visitor data using heatmaps, on-page surveys, scrollmaps and analyzed data to build a hypothesis for an experiment to simplify the buying process and increase conversion on the Buy Now page, which was their key performance indicator. Below is a screenshot of the winning variation:

The layout of the entire page was redesigned and a test was run for 2 months. The redesigned version increased the lead generation rate from 38% to 50%. 

Start your free trial on VWO and create an iterative and data-driven process for consistent improvements in your website conversion goals. 

Well-run user testing can drive conversions

Now you know the three steps to conducting impactful user testing. Let’s take a look at the results that can come from your efforts. 

At the end of the day, the reason you are gathering this data is to improve your site and, in turn, drive more conversions. 

Take the DTC office furniture brand, Fully, as an example. As the world transitioned to work from home in 2020, the brand had longer lead times on key products like their Jarvis standing desk. While this could have been an out-of-stock issue, user testing and creative thinking turned it into an opportunity to highlight other equally well-made products. 

Fully conducted remote usability testing, using a similar 3 step process as outlined above. Heatmap analysis showed high engagement with the filters and indicated that users who were not already familiar with Fully might not know what office furniture best suits their needs.

As a solution, improved product filters and categories were tested to increase visibility for the lesser-known product lines and provided users with a focused approach to navigating the entire catalog. This one test, which started with user testing, resulted in a 75:1 ROI for the brand.

Another example of powerful user testing driving conversions comes from Beckett Simonon, a hand-crafted leather shoe and accessory brand. 

The brand was looking to ensure paid acquisition efforts were converting effectively. They needed a website optimization solution that would result in sustainable, long-term improvements on their conversion rate. 

With remote user-testing sessions, it was revealed that users relied heavily on product images to make purchasing decisions. It also became apparent that users did not understand the differentiator of the brand. 

To solve this, the integration of value-based messaging in key image-driven moments of the customer journey was tested. Below is the original site and the variant tested based on insights from user testing. 

This result not only better demonstrated the core values of the brand but also resulted in a predicted annualized ROI of 237%. 

User testing unlocks insights that can drive results like Fully’s and Beckett Simonon’s for your eCommerce brand.

Get started with user testing

So, you’re ready to get started with user testing. Beyond usability, you now know that user testing is about both the action and understanding the thought behind each action. 

As a jumping-off point for your user testing, try out a tool that allows you to filter user-testers by age, income, gender, country, internet expertise, and type of device used to access your site. There are plenty of well-established options available. 

Remember, user testing is not just a pre-launch strategy for eCommerce brands. Ongoing testing is the best way to keep your customer journey enjoyable and the path to purchase smooth. That is the backbone of conversion rate optimization: constantly optimizing your website to keep customers happy, purchasing, and coming back.

Download Free: Mobile App A/B Testing Guide

Choosing the right A/B testing tools for mobile apps can be overwhelming for product managers, app developers, and app marketers alike. This is largely because zeroing in on the ideal tool or platform for your unique testing requirements depends on a plethora of parameters, some of which tend to get ignored if you make hasty or ill-informed decisions.

In this blog, we have compiled a list of the top 10 Mobile App A/B Testing tools and how to choose a tool to help you save time and avoid any unnecessary hassle. 

Top 10 A/B testing tools for mobile apps

Here’s a list of popularly known tools for mobile A/B testing tools for app experimentation along with their pros, cons, and pricing.

1. VWO Mobile App Testing

VWO Mobile App Testing is a robust solution for mobile app optimization. From experimenting with multiple variations of in-app user experiences (both user interface and server-side experimentation) to testing key features pre and post-launch, you can do it all with ease. 

Whether you wish to test basic UI changes such as CTA or banner copy, color, and placement, or make drastic optimizations to your search engine algorithms, game experiences, and beyond, you’re well equipped to steadily grow your app conversion rates, engagement, usage, and retention.

You can also combine the mobile app testing tool with VWO Insights which offers heat mapping, session recording, and form analytics capabilities so you can gather actionable insights on your app’s user experience and convert them into optimization opportunities.

Pros:

• Advanced options for segmentation and targeting that allow you to segment your users based on their behavioral attributes and target them exclusively.
• Integrates with all major analytics platforms so you can capture and analyze the relevant data required to make informed experimentation decisions. 
• VWO’s SDK for mobile app A/B testing is open-source and lightweight (approx 200KB for Android and 285KB for iOS) and only uses about 100KB or 300KB of RAM for the iOS and Android apps. 
• VWO offers 24*5 (& exceptional response time) with optimization experts assisting you throughout your journey to ensure you yield the desired results from your campaigns. With a CSAT of 98% (as compared to the industry average of 94%), VWO’s support team takes complete ownership of resolving all pitfalls you may come across, thus ensuring you make the most of your mobile app optimization program

Cons:

• Don’t have a forever free plan like other product offerings.

Pricing:

Offers enterprise plan that costs $1,595 per month and is billed annually. This plan includes the ability to track up to 50,000 users each month. Check out more about pricing and plans.

2. Optimizely

Optimizely offers a cross-platform solution for feature flagging and experimentation that allows you to run UI-based as well as server-side experiments and mitigate risk while launching features. You get access to full-stack and multi-channel experimentation capabilities, phased feature rollouts, the option to make instant app updates, and more with Optimizely’s mobile optimization offering. 

Pros:

• Easy SDK integration that reduces the time to go live with experiments.
• An option to integrate with data warehouses such as Snowflake, which can improve data analysis.
• Ability to target features based on specific locations, demographics, or any custom attributes.

Cons:

• Running software can be costly for small businesses.
• Using Optimizely effectively requires technical expertise, which can be a barrier for non-developer teams. 

Pricing:

They offer a free rollout plan valid for 7 days that allows you to evaluate their basic capabilities.

3. AB Tasty

AB Tasty offers UX analytics, experimentation, personalization, and feature flag management capabilities that allow you to optimize end-to-end experiences on your mobile app. Using these, you can create user segments, offer unique experiences for various segments of your user base, and experiment with features before rolling them out. 

Pros:

• User-friendly dashboard with a variety of features like a dedicated code editor. 
• Simple one-tag implementation to do the initial setup.
• Availability of a variety of targeting options, making it simple to reach diverse customers and segments.

Cons:

• The pricing is not transparent.
• There are superior options available in the market for recording sessions and creating heatmaps. 
• Lack of in-depth integration with third-party tools like ContentSquare for intelligence and analysis.

Pricing:

You can avail of a custom quote from their website based on your unique users/month and other requirements.

4. Adobe Target

Target is a testing and personalization platform from the house of Adobe. Target integrates seamlessly with Adobe Analytics and Adobe Audience Manager. It can be used for optimizing your app experiences based on your user behavior to improve engagement. 

Pros:

• Experiments can be easily set up and deployed. 
• In-built custom segmentation and audience targeting.

Cons:

• Target does not offer feature management capabilities, so you might opt for a different tool. 
• Lacks post-segmentation capability.

Pricing:

Adobe Target follows a usage-based pricing model that is determined by three key factors: product option, number of monthly visitors, and platform (Web/Server/Mobile).

5. Firebase A/B Testing

From the house of Google Optimize, Firebase A/B Testing provides both experimentation and feature management capabilities. Since it’s offered by Google, it integrates seamlessly with all other tools from Google, such as Google Analytics, so sourcing data and drilling insights for your campaigns will not be an issue. 

Note: Google has decided to sunset Google Optimize and Google Optimize 360 in September 2023. If you are a user, you can move to VWO with just one click.

Pros:

• The app owner can easily roll back any features if they experience issues during testing by monitoring the app’s stability.
• Setting up and deploying experiments is easy. 
• Minimal impact on website speed (497 ms), which is significantly less than other available tools.

Cons:

• There is a limit of 300 total drafts, running, and completed experiments for A/B Testing.
• A/B Testing is restricted to 24 experiments at once, but ending a running test can make room for a new one.
• Firebase experiments can have a maximum of 8 variants, including the baseline.
• Limited options for targeting an audience for an experiment. 
• Firebase lacks the facility to schedule testing campaigns.
• It doesn’t have the option of creating mutually exclusive groups for testing.

Pricing:

The spark plan of Firebase A/B testing is available for free.

6. Leanplum

Leanplum, a subsidiary of Clevertap, specializes in web and mobile app A/B testing coupled with multi-channel lifecycle marketing, enabling seamless personalized mobile experiences from start to finish. Its toolkit encompasses mobile app A/B testing facilitated by an intuitive drag-and-drop editor, comprehensive post-experimentation reporting featuring funnel and cohort analysis, as well as retention and revenue monitoring. The platform allows the creation of personalized user experiences within the app.

Pros:

• Excellent tool for basic operations like creating visually appealing emails, analyzing basic metrics, and audience filters
• Maneuvering tools is difficult without a dev support team.
• Ease to create and deploy custom messages as per customer behavior.

Cons:

• Missing features such as static audience lists, transparent email performance reports, and conversion attribution.
• The cloud version is difficult to operate with a limited interface functionality. 

Pricing:

Leanplum is available for demo on request and offers custom pricing.

7. Amplitude

Amplitude is a product analytics platform with various offerings that include data analysis, data management and integration, data unification using CDP, feature management, and experimentation. It allows you to run simple UI/UX-based app experiments as well as feature experiments on search algorithms and product recommendations. The product depends on sequential testing and T-tests for statistical outcomes of experiments like the A/B test.

Pros:

• User behavior analysis and app A/B testing analysis from a single platform, which overcomes data silos and gaps.
• Elegant data visualization to comprehend customer behavior data from various touchpoints

Cons:

• Difficult to migrate data in and out of the platform.
• Overwhelming and confusing experience because of too many features packed into a single platform.
• Unavoidable tech dependencies to slice and dice data and create customized dashboards.

Pricing:

The pricing is not public, and the experimentation feature is offered at custom prices and in tandem with Amplitudes’s growth and enterprise plans.

8. Taplytics

Taplytics is an A/B testing platform that offers feature management, feature rollout, and client-side and server-side testing. You can deploy A/B tests and personalized experiences on iOS, Android, and mobile web with a code-variable library and visual editor. The platform employs Z-Score and Two-Tailed T-Test to assess experiment performance.

Pros:

• User-centric workflow to deploy code-free and code-based experiments. 
• Very specific control over who you’re reaching, even down to individual email addresses.

Cons:

• Limited third-party integration option, needing workarounds to get things done.
• Can’t break down reports by individual users; only session-level data is available for analysis.

Pricing:

The pro plan starts at $500/month. While the enterprise plan and custom plan depend on the client’s needs. 

9. Apptimize

Apptimize serves as a versatile cross-channel A/B testing solution, facilitating experimentation across various platforms including apps, mobile web, web, and OTT. Its main features include creating omnichannel personalized users, and management of feature releases. You can do it all through a single dashboard for comprehensive testing and management.

Pros:

• User-friendly dashboard that allows you to manage multiple experiments on different channels with ease.
• Assists in anticipating potential feature failures before their release.

Cons:

• Apptimize might not be the best choice in terms of pricing, as it could exceed the budget for certain businesses.
• Developers require time to understand how the platform operates to deploy tests effectively.

Pricing:

Apptimize provides free feature flagging. For more advanced features like cross-platform A/B experiments, they offer custom pricing and plans.

10. LaunchDarkly

LaunchDarkly focuses on helping you optimize your mobile app with ease. It provides tools for managing feature flags and enhancing mobile app performance on a larger scale. You’ll have the power to control every aspect of your app’s features, from development and testing to deployment and performance evaluation. This control empowers you to reduce potential risks and confidently launch your features.

Pros:

• Ease in the implementation and instant toggling on and off of feature flags.
• Ability to directly resolve bugs and issues without needing to resubmit the app or wait for approvals from the app store.

Cons:

• User creation and management system exhibits disorderliness, as it inadvertently exposes ongoing tests to every newly registered user.
• Overwhelming experience due to the many options available for configuring a target.

Pricing:

You can get started with a free trial or avail yourself of the starter plan at $8.33/month (limited to one member) to try out its basic functionalities. However, this pack does not include experimentation features, for which you will have to upgrade to a higher plan. 

Know how high-performance teams launch features

We have a 60-minute recorded webinar about feature rollout that can help your product launch. In this webinar, Sonil Luthra and Rohan Shorey from VWO talk about how to introduce new features effectively. They use some real-life examples and even discuss how a well-known brand did it. They’ll also answer any questions you have about getting your new feature accepted and how well it performs. This webinar will give you new ideas and understanding to make your product even better.

Watch: Feature rollout – How high-performance teams launch features

How to choose the right mobile app A/B testing tool?

The ideal Mobile App A/B Testing platform is robust enough to offer extensive testing functionality that allows you to optimize your end-to-end in-app experiences as well as feature management capabilities so you can manage your entire feature lifecycle. Ultimately, the aim is to figure out the right variation of in-app experiences and features in order to optimize your app for improved engagement and conversions. 

To select the tool best suited for your CRO roadmap, consider the following parameters.

1. Use case at hand

Mobile App A/B Testing has a myriad of use cases similar to the A/B testing of the mobile web version. For you to be able to select the right tool for your business, you need to first have a clear understanding of the use cases you want to tackle (at least the ones you wish to begin with). Once you are clear about that, you are automatically a step closer to narrowing down on the tool that offers maximum capabilities that cater to your requirements.  

Some of the most common use cases of mobile app A/B testing include:

a. eCommerce

i. Eliminating friction in key user flows

For today’s on-the-go buyer who demands seamless shopping experiences, friction in user interactions and flows, especially one as critical as checkout, can lead to frustration and loss of interest, which ultimately increases your abandonment rate. In fact, did you know that mobile has the highest cart abandonment rate (beating tablets and desktops) of 85.65%? A/B testing your eCommerce app’s user flows can help you radically reduce drop-offs and abandonment rate, by paving the way for a delightful user experience.

Mobile app A/B testing tools allow you to create two or more variants of your user flows so you can pit them against each other and deploy the one that leads to the maximum improvement in your key user engagement metrics. Furthermore, your tool must also enable you to segment your users based on their purchase and browsing behavior, and other demographic attributes so you can target them with the most relevant variation and figure out what works for which group.

ii. Optimizing for the efficacy of search and product recommendation algorithms

Should your product recommendation algorithm be based on shoppers’ purchase history, trending items, or the most popular products from a particular category? How should your search algorithm categorize products, decide their relevance to a specific search query, and on what criteria should they be ranked on the search results page?

With mobile app A/B testing, you shouldn’t have to rely on guesswork or best practices to find the answers to the above questions. While testing UI-based changes is one use case that a robust tool caters to, it also allows you to experiment with your critical algorithms, including product recommendation and search, so you can strategically improve their efficacy. By testing multiple versions of your algorithms, you can figure out which one proves to be the most effective for your store, whether it is in driving upsell/cross-sell or fetching the most relevant search results.

b. Gaming

i. Experimenting with in-app features before deploying universally

Universally deploying a new feature in your game can be quite tricky. You could either hit the jackpot and instantly watch your app usage and engagement levels jump up, or, on a more realistic note, it may or may not drive the results you thought it would. Therefore, mobile app A/B testing tools allow you to reduce the risk associated with launching in-game changes and updates by experimenting with them and rolling them out in stages to one or more of your user segments. If it performs well, you can go ahead and deploy it for all users; if not, you can always collect feedback, incorporate it, improve it, and relaunch the enhanced app version with confidence.

Mobile app A/B testing tools also offer extensive feature lifecycle management capabilities wherein you can roll out features in stages, test them out on a particular user segment, and even use feature flags to manage them at runtime and control and/or modify who gets access to it.

ii. Streamlining in-app pricing strategy

To maximize engagement on your gaming app as well as revenue, you might have to experiment with multiple pricing strategies, for different user segments as the same model might not work for both disengaged and loyal gamers. Therefore, choose a mobile app A/B testing tool that allows you to test your dynamic pricing algorithm to figure out which one drives the best results for which segment.

iii. Offer personalized gaming experiences

In today’s day and age, mobile app gaming experiences demand hyper-personalization, and rightfully so. To create an enticing gaming environment that keeps gamers hooked, you cannot possibly rely on a single strategy. Using a mobile app A/B testing tool, you can test all dynamic elements of your gaming app and deliver personalized experiences based on each gamer’s level in the game, engagement score, and other attributes. This way, you can constantly discover and deliver what your users expect from you to keep them engaged. 

The bottom line is that whichever use case you want to achieve with mobile app A/B testing, you want to be sure of it beforehand so you can make a strategic decision of choosing the right one based on your requirements. 

2. Integrations and plugins offered by the tool

You want to make sure that whichever tool you opt for is the right addition to your tech stack, meaning that it integrates seamlessly with your other analytics, marketing, and sales platforms, so you don’t have a hard time accessing the required data and feeding it into your app optimization pipeline. For example, the most important one would be your analytics platform, so you can use it to generate insights about your website traffic and target audience, which will then form the basis for crafting hypotheses.

For this, create a list of tools you currently use and look for the ones supported by the experimentation platform you are evaluating. If you own an eCommerce business, you might also want to ensure that whichever eCommerce platform your store is built on (such as Shopify or WooCommerce) is also supported.  

VWO, for instance, integrates with all major web analytics tools, eCommerce platforms, CSM platforms, sales, and ABM platforms.

3. Size, RAM usage, and performance of the SDK

The SDK supported by the platform deserves your attention as well as it can impact your app’s performance. Here are the parameters that you must evaluate it for: 

• The SDK must be lightweight, so it does not have any significant impact on the size of your app. 
• Should not use a lot of RAM as mobile devices anyway have scarce RAM availability. 
• Must perform well and be easily available at all times. VWO’s SDK for mobile app A/B testing is available even without an active internet connection and is tested extensively to get rid of all bugs that might negatively impact your app’s performance.

4. Reporting capabilities

It’s important to pay heed to understanding the computation of A/B test results and generation of reports as it determines the impact of your experimentation. Statistics is the backbone of A/B testing, which is based on the calculation of probabilities. However, there are multiple approaches to interpreting probabilities in A/B testing – the most common ones being Frequentist and Bayesian models.

Make sure you find out whether the tool you have shortlisted uses the Frequentist or Bayesian statistical model. Traditionally, most tools used the Frequentist model wherein test results are based solely on the data from the current mobile app experiments and do not take into account any previous data. The Frequentist model is based on running a particular test for a specific period of time and until statistical significance is reached so enough data can be collected to rightfully calculate the probability of one variation beating the other. However, it does not quantify the difference between the two variations keeping in account the uncertainty involved with the amount of data you obtained in a test. 

The Bayesian statistical model, on the other hand, provides a natural way of learning by allowing you to feed in your beliefs from similar previous experiments into the model as prior, combine it with data from the current one, and then compute the test results. The probability of your hypothesis being correct is computed based on evolving data and informed by what’s happened up to that point. 

VWO’s Bayesian-powered statistics engine, SmartStats, helps you make smarter conversion rate optimization decisions by not only giving you the probability of one variation beating the other but also the potential loss associated with its deployment. With SmartStats, you can move away from relying solely on reaching statistical significance or running tests for a set period of time and can conclude tests faster and expect more accurate results. SmartStats helps you make intelligent business decisions, faster and gain a competitive edge over your competitors. 

Imagine a scenario where you are not sure whether providing an add-on offer with your service can lead to more sales. You planned to do an A/B test to test this hypothesis by allocating one-half of traffic to service with add-on (Variation A) and the other half without add-on (Variation B). 

A traditional Frequentist test would only provide a yes/no answer if variation A is different from variation B. Also, the test results are valid only after you have obtained a sufficient number of visitors in your test.

However, VWO’s Bayesian powered statistics engine, SmartStats, provides you the odds of one variation beating the other and also the underlying potential loss in sales associated with each variation. Both metrics remain valid throughout the duration of the test. 

With SmartStats, you can move away from binary outputs to more interpretable metrics.

Download Free: Mobile App A/B Testing Guide

5. Your budget

Needless to say, your budget is a huge factor to consider in choosing a tool. Based on the specific use cases you want to tackle and the features you require, you will have to look for a tool that fits the bill as well as fits well into your budget so you can drive significant ROI from your experimentation program. 

Especially if you are just starting out with mobile app optimization, opting for a comparatively expensive tool might not yield you a significant ROI. Instead, start with a tool that offers a free trial, so you can assess all its features comprehensively and decide whether it meets your requirements. VWO, for instance, offers a free trial that your team can utilize to run a few campaigns and figure out if your unique needs are met.

6. Support and assistance offered by the platform

When evaluating a tool, people often overlook the level and quality of support that the platform offers. However, it is a critical factor that plays a major role in determining the testing velocity and scale of your optimization program. If you receive dedicated, expert assistance throughout your journey, you will be able to achieve your goals more efficiently and grow your efforts with time. 

Moreover, if you’re new to mobile app A/B testing, you might need some help in setting up the first few campaigns and generating ideas to do an A/B test So, make sure you opt for a tool that offers the best-in-class support (quick response time, maximum availability, sufficient self-help resources, omni-channel support, CSAT, and so on) so you can not only get up to speed but also drive the intended results effectively.

Even if you are somewhat experienced and well-versed with A/B testing your mobile app experiences, you might need extensive support immediately after signing up for a new tool. To that end, make sure you opt for a tool that offers dedicated support, quick TATs, and effective resolution to help you troubleshoot all your experimentation roadblocks.

Truth be told – you need a tool that’s all-encompassing. There isn’t one factor mentioned above that’s less important and you shouldn’t have to compromise on the quality of testing or your requirements. 

Conclusion

Choosing the right tool that best aligns with your experimentation goals is only the first (although extremely crucial) step towards improving your app’s key metrics. Leveraging the tool successfully means closing the optimization loop by investing time and effort in everything from benchmarking your KPIs to documenting your learnings and feeding them back into your testing roadmap. Sign up for a free trial with VWO to do this with ease. 

Frequently asked questions

Nadia walks us through her thoughts about the X (experience) in UX (user experience) and why it plays a central role in crafting seamless experiences.

Download Free: Customer Experience Optimization Guide

Here’s a synopsis of this interesting conversation. 

What is experience?

Marketers undertake activities like researching the market, seeking customer feedback, and experimenting, for one main reason – to create the right experiences for users. This is because great experiences lead to frictionless customer journeys and pave the way for higher conversions. 

Tapping on these lines, Nadia begins the session by explaining what is experience and deciphering its importance in the retail industry. According to Nadia, experience is a feeling, and not a habit. When you visit a coffee shop and the barista creates a latte art, that is an experience. The early morning coffee you have everyday from your coffee pot is not, it’s just a habit. She explains that in retail, simply giving your customers access to your products is not enough. You need to go beyond that and create frictionless and seamless experiences for the customers.

What is the role of technology in creating these experiences?

Technology by itself may not lead to creating the right experiences especially when it’s not designed keeping the customer at the centre. Nadia explains this with the example of self-checkout machines. 

The self-checkout machines were launched to reduce in-store dependencies and long checkout queues, especially in the departmental stores. However, the technology failed miserably. Rather than offering convenience, they either were unable to identify items, showed payment errors, or confused customers during the checkout process.

Amazon Go’s ‘Just Walk Out Shopping,’ on the other hand, proved the opposite. Besides promising convenience and creating a smooth checkout process, it ensured an experience that customers wanted to relive frequently.

The best use of technology in retail is to create a smooth transition between online and in-store environments. Nadia explains how you can do so with connected customer profiles, creating contextual moments, and using technology as a bandaid and not a painkiller. 

“Technology is not a bandaid; it’s a painkiller.”

Download Free: Customer Experience Optimization Guide

What is a great retail experience?

Nadia emphasizes that a great retail experience is about capturing the essence of what you’re selling.

So, how can you do this? You can tell a story, evoke emotions, and build a community.

Narrate a story that sells: One way you can capture the essence is by telling a story. As humans, we are wired for stories, and every brand has one. For instance, at Everlane, transparency is all the story. They want everyone to know where the product they’re buying came from, how it came about, and its impact on the world.

Evoke emotions: Another way to capture the essence is by evoking emotions. For instance, if you sell mattresses, you must convey coziness, sleep, and the like through your in-store and digital properties. 

Build a community: Humans seek to be a part of a community. Apple is a wonderful example of building a sense of community in retail environments with the series of events that take place at Apple stores.

Storytelling, emotion, and community building are the key ingredients to memorable customer experience.

How does the above translate into eCommerce?

Nadia explains how eCommerce is no longer just about convenience and speed. A great eCommerce experience comes from three elements:

1. Inspiration and personalization
2. Recognizing that conversion, even though a key success metric, is a moment in the customer journey and not the final destination
3. Building customer trust

Nadia uses the example of Everlane’s online space to explain the point of building customer trust. Their website shows customers where products are made, and shares everything about the factory and the manufacturing practices used. There is transparency around costs too. 

When you show your customers who you are and how you work, you take the first step toward building trust. And Nadia believes that trust is the first principle of conversion.

Concluding her session, Nadia states that the experience landscape is rapidly evolving, and knowing how to operate amid such volatility is strategically imperative. The sooner you understand your target audience’s basic psyche and decode their definition of experience, the sooner you’ll unlock doors to success.

We hope the webinar enriches your understanding of the importance of building strong customer experiences and spurs creative thinking about the effective ways to overcome challenges in the process. We invite you to share your thoughts and feedback.

You can also watch and register for our webinars here.

In this episode, Brooke talks about her passion for UX research, what her professional journey of more than two decades has looked like, and what these years have taught her about the human psyche. 

At VWO, we believe that CRO and UX are a match made in heaven. They have a common aim – to delight users with a smooth browsing experience so that business metrics go up. As part of the CRO industry, we also recognize that UX efforts complement and lends long term benefit to optimization. Google’s recent experience algorithm that rolled out this year also prioritizes website user experience as a critical factor for ranking.

Download Free: Customer Experience Optimization Guide

Therefore a session on UX research with Brookes left us with rich learnings and we thought that it prudent to summarize the key highlights and insights from the conversation for you:

Brooke’s professional journey and her role at WhatsApp

Brooke started working with startups while she was in graduate school and has been in product design and research for a little over 20 years. While she initially had no master plan, she took up every opportunity that allowed her to learn and grow by working with people having diverse skill sets which amplified her innate skills.

A few years ago, she took up an exciting role at Facebook, where she worked for their Ads- Emerging Markets team in London. It allowed her to travel all over the world, spend time and conduct research in emerging markets including India, Mexico, Brazil, and Indonesia, and learn more about countries she’s always admired. 

About a year and a half later, she thought it was time to challenge herself and look for other exciting opportunities within the company. WhatsApp had just decided that introducing a User Research team made business sense, and she was offered the chance to be one of the first researchers in the team. She thought it was the perfect next step for her given WhatsApp is a huge product in countries she’s always loved, been interested in, maybe have lived in, or have spent quite a bit of time in. 

What keeps Brooke motivated and excited about her work?

Brooke likes to learn new stuff and would get bored if she has to do the same thing over and over again. She feels UX Research is a job that continually challenges her and offers an immense amount of learning. After all, it’s a job tailored for curious souls who are professional tinkerers. 

She adds that the experience of witnessing engineers, product managers, or data scientists from her team get their hands dirty in the field with her and see how users in downtown USA or Hong Kong perceive the utility of the countless WhatsApp features is education above par. 

UX Research for a Billion people

Brooke highlights that WhatsApp never tries to move the fastest to get the shiny new feature out as a company. With over 2 Billion monthly active users, they must take their time before any release to ensure that the voices of users from key markets and countries are heard. Therefore, in WhatsApp’s case, UX research typically involves much more than just traveling to one country for a week and talking to 20 users, for instance. She also talks about the fact that WhatsApp’s usage could vary drastically across geographies and analyzing the differences and similarities among such a diverse user population is a very important part of her job. 

Evolution of UX Research over the decades

Brooke recollects that when she first started, her role was titled ‘Information Architect’, and usability testing was one of the foremost and primary responsibilities. Usability Study was one of the first things she learned where she’d expose a group of people to a prototype or simply a design on a piece of paper and have them work their way through it, which would help her figure out whether or not the design worked. 

Over time, she feels that the umbrella of UX has evolved to embrace many disciplines (such as psychology, sociology, anthropology, and behavioral economy) that have their methodological approaches but come together to offer immense value to the field. While this could also lead to disagreement and chaos, most professionals she’s come across have been in favor of codifying and bringing a structure to their approaches. Over the years, working with experts from all these disciplines has truly widened her perspective and skillset in the discipline. 

When to use which UX Research methodology?

Formative research is used to generate new product ideas, while summative research is used to evaluate a designed product. Formative research is carried out before beginning the product development to understand users’ pain points and figure out what exactly you can solve. Summative research, on the other hand, is used to test the efficiency and efficacy of your product design, before spending engineering bandwidth building it out entirely. 

Another way to look at formative vs summative research – formative research is useful when the researcher’s purpose is to fix users’ problems with their product to make it more user-friendly. Formative testing should be conducted multiple times over a product’s design lifecycle and should be perceived as a directional compass for “what next” in the product from a usability lens. For example, usability testing of the feel and control of a working prototype of an IoT device is a means of formative research.

Summative research is useful when a product’s design has concluded. After completion, product owners typically try to understand what parts of a product are “high-utility” and the ones that aren’t. This research is best done after designing the product but before spending engineering time building it. An example of summative research is when 15-20 users test a mobile handset for features like battery life, gameplay experience, etc. before the device is launched to the public. 

Brooke emphasizes that when looking for what to build next, you must carry out formative research, and to assess your product stickiness, summative research is the way to go. 

Download Free: Customer Experience Optimization Guide

How do new businesses get started with UX Research?

Brooke advises new businesses not to hold back on UX research due to the lack of a large enough user pool. Whether it is your friends or family, you can get anyone who matches your typical user persona to review your product (or its prototype) and share their feedback. What’s important is to pick people who you know will not shy away from telling you the truth. 

Brooke stresses the fact that when you are starting, it is natural to want to hear just positive reviews about something you’ve poured your heart and soul into. However, fighting that urge and the urge to tell people how to use your product is the hardest part. You need to fight the urge to intervene; let the user figure out your design by themselves and tell you their honest opinion. 

Over time, Brooke has learned to embrace negative feedback as she feels it opens so many windows of opportunities for improvement. 

The more different we are, the more similar we are

Brooke is a firm believer in the tenet that we have a lot more in common around the globe than we think. She realized that dreams of having a decent job, doing well for one’s family, saving up enough for a nice vacation, being a respected member of the community, are universal no matter which part of the world you go to. 

She emphasizes that the hustle to do better for themselves and their loved ones is something she’s found common in people from every country she’s ever researched in. She finds such deeply universal traits uplifting and comforting.

How to make the most of a UX Research program

Brooke highlights that it’s important to start soon, yet go slow and not expect instant or continuous success. While it’s imperative to get feedback as frequently in the design life cycle as possible to confirm if your efforts are going in the right direction, you needn’t test every single product or feature, every single time. Instead, carefully assess the feasibility of your research program and learn to embrace its imperfections.

Must-have tools in UX Researcher’s stack

• The primary tool that a UX researcher cannot do without is a natural sense of curiosity. Brooke feels that the urge to know and understand people and why they perform a certain task in a particular way is the single most important thing for any UX researcher. 
• Brooke highlights that the best researchers she knows have a high degree of self-awareness. This means that the clarity that they have about their minds and biases is borderline frightening. They know that they see the world in a certain way, and also acknowledge that maybe everyone else doesn’t. 

Building UX for trust and authenticity

Brooke feels focusing on what causes distrust is easier and a more solvable problem. Her advice is to look for elements that cause distrust in the technology or the platform and eliminate those. Examples of elements that cause distrust would be unnecessary pop-ups in a site or app, unexpected charges being added during the time of checkout on an online store, or lack of a comprehensive and easy-to-understand privacy policy. 

Conducting UX Research in a niche market

• Brooke advises that if it is unfeasible to test directly with your target persona, one can break down the roles and responsibilities of the person in question and then look for the next best representative or proxy who also meets the criteria. 
• Another approach is Snowball Recruiting, wherein you can ask participants to connect you with their network where you are likely to find similar representatives.

Brooke’s UX reading list

The following are some books that Brooke seeks inspiration from, in her typical day at work:

• Don’t Make Me Think – Steve Krug

A guide on the principles of intuitive navigation and information design.

• Rocket Surgery Made Easy – Steve Krug

A guide on a realistic approach to usability testing that anyone can easily replicate for their site, application, or other product.

• Nudge – Richard Thaler & Cass Sunstein

An easy-to-understand take on the brain’s decision-making under uncertainty and designing environments that leverage how the brain functions. 

• Thinking Fast And Slow – Daniel Kahneman

Insights into how humans think, how they make judgments and decisions, and how to unlock the benefits of slow thinking. 

VWO’s views on UX research

UX research helps optimizers formulate better hypotheses, prioritize ideas effectively, and understand user journeys better. On the other hand, CRO helps UX researchers with the right set of testing tools and helps them validate ideas that stem out of their research. The real magic happens when both CRO and UX teams work in collaboration and share learnings. If you’re looking for an A/B testing tool, you can avail an all-inclusive and guided 30-day free trial here. Alternately, you can request a demo with our optimization experts to understand how VWO can take care of end-to-end CRO for you. 

In addition to offering mouse movement heatmaps, website heatmaps offer scrollmap to gauge content engagement, clickmap to track and analyze click data, classic heatmap for overall page performance, and eye tracking heatmaps to capture gaze frequency and fixation length – eye-tracking heatmaps are often confused with mouse heatmaps though. Their use cases are widely different, and this blog attempts to educate readers around the nature of these differences.

Download Free: Website Heatmap Guide

This blog also aims to navigate your way through what mouse heatmaps are, why they are important, and how it’s insights differ from the straightforward scroll and click insights that other heatmap types offer. We’ll also leave you with a list of the most popular and robust mouse heatmap tools to choose from for your mouse heatmap exercise

What is mouse heatmap and why is it important?

Mouse heatmap visually represents visitors’ mouse movement data using thermal imaging – it records where visitors are hovering, clicking, scrolling, and pausing through your web pages. It is often also referred to as mouse tracking heatmap, mouse movement heatmap, hover map, attention map, attention heatmaps, or move maps.

By leveraging mouse heatmaps, one can identify hover patterns that can help discover areas of high visitor frustration and reading struggles. Such insights are especially useful when seeking to optimize complex web pages made up of text, images, varied dynamic elements, and more. 

The trending discussion at this hour around mouse heatmap pertains to its interchangeability with eye tracking heatmap or if the former can be a more scalable alternative to the latter. Even though the contribution that both these heatmaps make towards gauging webpage usability and user attention, there is one added promise mouse heatmaps offer that eye tracking heatmaps don’t – “the ability to estimate the relevance of search results in the presence or absence of clicks for improving search relevance estimation, to study web usability design and to determine preferred reading regions that help in inferring which portions of long documents receive more user attention.”

Let us look as more such applications of mouse heatmaps that make it an equally good if not a better alternative to other website heatmap types:

1. Predict and measure user experience

By tracking and visualizing users’ mouse or cursor movement trends, mouse heatmaps help uncover insights that offer signals to predict whether your website’s user experience (UX) is good or not, to infer user attention pattern in complex pages, and how it may be different for varying page layout, to identify popular part of the page that grabs the most attention, and to identify distractions. Given below is a heatmap plotted on one of our blogs:

The heatmap shows that visitors paused the most over the images in the blog when compared to other sections. Among other things, this means that the images or the section in which the images were placed were capturing more visitors’ attention. Insights like these can expedite the decision-making process by providing data-backed actionables.

Such a multitude of data serves as an idea repository that can be revisited time and again to look for solutions to experience breakage.

2. Take cues to influence decision making

Mouse heatmaps function more on observing the psyche behind actions rather than on the mere behavioral observation of choices. While other heatmap types track and represent on-site choices/actions that visitors make, the scope of mouse heatmaps extends beyond this to take into consideration the process behind the choices/actions. What this means is that for every choice made, the mouse movement made towards or away from the other available alternative actions signals that those alternatives were also considered during the decision-making process. By helping you trace the entire process, mouse movements help you make changes in your interface or product that have a greater impact on visitor attention.

An eCommerce analyst can take a quick look at the mouse movement pattern right before visitors drop off from their checkout page to identify elements that almost caught their attention but failed to be captivating enough to retain it, and then optimize those elements so that the next visitor from that segment finds it rather interesting to stick around longer or to click it and convert. For instance, the analyst can look at the checkout page’s mouse heatmap to trace mouse movement tracks and uncover hover data around the main call to action button (CTA) to analyze if it is getting traction or not. And if the CTA is failing to draw visitor attention, what can be the reasons behind it: are there distractions, did visitors even move their cursors towards the CTA before dropping off, and so on.

3. Capitalize on existing website traffic

No one is a stranger to the fact that thousands of dollars go into acquiring new traffic for a website. Mouse heatmap eliminates the need for such heavy investments as it capitalizes on your existing website traffic for insights that would make the existing traffic convert more.

For instance, a SaaS marketer can run highly targeted and personalized campaigns for specific audience segments, and UX designers can curate website designs that resonate highly with the target audience by using the visitor behavior insights that mouse heatmaps equip them with. Mouse heatmaps come as a hugely cost-effective option when looking to optimize website conversions, at the same time, retaining the existing traffic.

4. Increase conversion rate

All of the benefits of using mouse heatmap boils down to contribute to one overarching goal – optimizing a website to increase conversions. Mouse heatmaps provide valuable insights that can help identify high-attention areas, distractions, frustration points, broken links, or confusing navigation, and also help in assessing the effectiveness of your content, design, and overall page/website layout. For instance, an eCommerce marketer can look at the mouse heatmap of visitors on their product page and discover if visitors are finding it difficult to look for product information, if visitors are clicking on image thumbnails expecting them to open up, and more. Here is a screenshot of another heatmap that we ran on our blog :

A glance at the heatmap will tell you that the search bar garnered the most attention on the entire page. Maybe such insights tell you that it’s time to optimize your blog search algorithm, or that you need to optimize the design and placement of the search bar itself. 

All such insights contribute to the creation of a data-backed repository of ideas to be tested for optimization – set up mouse heatmap/s, wait out the sample period, analyze heatmaps for insights, prioritize and create variations based on the insights, test the variation(s) and control, and deploy the winning version.

Download Free: Website Heatmap Guide

Top 3 free open source mouse heatmap tools for your website

Investing in any third-party tool is always a daunting task, especially because when it comes to online businesses, all third-party tools are connected to the website. In addition to the cost factor, there is also an element of trust that needs to be met. Installing too many or a sketchy third-party tool onto your website can drastically impact its performance metrics, particularly load time. To help you take mouse heatmap for a spin before making a monetary commitment to any available product, and to help you gauge if mouse heatmap is the way to go about achieving the concerned goals or not, here’s a lit of top free mouse heatmap tools that you can test for your use case:

Mousetrap

Developed by Pascal Kieslich, Felix Henninger, Dirk Wulff, and Jonas Haslbeck, and published under the GNU General Public License (version 3), Mousetrap offers capabilities for “importing, preprocessing, analyzing, aggregating, and visualizing mouse-tracking data.”

OGAMA

OpenGazeAndMouseAnalyzer or OGAMA is an open-source heatmap tool that tracks and analyzes mouse movement in slideshow study designs. In addition to mouse heatmap, OGAMA also offers eye tracking capabilities. In fact, OGAMA offers 8 different modules for behavior analysis, some of which are the attention map module, fixation module, and areas of interest module.

MouseTracks

MouseTracks tracks and displays mouse movement. It is engineered in such a way that old movements fade away over time, so the heatmap can be left running for as long as required. It generates colorful mouse tracks and a heatmap for all the clicks recorded. Its current version is fully supported on Windows and, to some extent, on Mac and Linus, but its a work in progress for the latter two.

Conclusion

The insights that mouse heatmaps generate are of a very different nature than mere mouse click and scroll behavior data. Click and scroll data does not provide an insight into what visitors did on the page apart from clicking where they did and their scroll depth. As iterated above, mouse heatmaps track everything ranging from clicks and scrolls to pauses and hovers.

By providing all-round data on visitors’ on-page behavior, mouse heatmaps empower its users to unlock a very dynamic caveat of visitor behavior insights. When used in combination with other analytics tools like session replays or form analytics, all the findings from a mouse heatmap can be easily corroborated and verified, so there is no room for any possible guesswork. So get your heat mapping socks on, identify friction points in visitor journeys, and optimize experiences for increased conversions.

FAQs on Mouse Heatmap

If UX research paper linguistics is not your flavor of the day, allow me to keep it simple – “Where do people look at, in your interface?”

Heatmaps hold the key to much of that deceptively simple question. Put simply, heatmaps are a rich visual interpretation of responses triggered by interacting with digital systems. A typical characteristic of the visual interpretation is the abstraction of large swathes of this interaction data in actionable quant – elements with most clicks, pages with deepest scroll depths and interface areas with the highest density of mouse movements, to name a few.

Download Free: Website Heatmap Guide

This quantification has powerful ramifications for UX teams. By means of this article, we attempt to decode a few interpretations and their practical applications for better usability.

Leverage Every Click, Pause, and Scroll for Your UX Design

There are 2 types of data that can help you find a solution to the aforementioned dilemma: quantitative data and qualitative data. 

Quantitative data is gathered using research tools like Google Analytics (GA). The problem with relying on quantitative data alone is that even though it can give you a performance number against each metric that you track, it, however, fails to provide any insight into the reason behind the performance – good or bad. For example, if a visitor churned when moving from stage A to stage B in their journey, quantitative data will only tell you that they churned and not why they churned. And this is where website heatmap, a qualitative UX research tool that tracks and visualizes visitors’ on-site or on-page behavior, comes into the picture. 

The first thing to keep in mind when designing an interface or when designing for better UX is that this process is a continuous one – there is no one final, fixed design that will work forever. People change their choices and often modify their needs. This, coupled with the n number of updates on every digital platform, calls for continuous design iterations and hence, makes the exercise of gathering, analyzing and leveraging user interaction data ever more important. And what better way to achieve this than leveraging the power of a robust website heatmap tool. Heatmaps tell you exactly what works and what doesn’t, and also provides actionable data, so the changes you make are data-backed. 

Additionally, website heatmaps offer 5 different types of data collection and visualization methods, namely heatmap, clickmap, scrollmap, eye tracking heatmap, mouse tracking heatmap. Each click, scroll, cursory hover, gaze shift, gaze frequency data gathered using the various types of website heatmap empowers you to test and optimize the main design elements of your website like CTA buttons, navigation, images, text, and the overall layout. Let’s now see how each heatmap equips you with actionable data that can help you optimize the user experience your website delivers:

CTA Buttons

CTA buttons are one of the major elements on both a website and an app, and having clear CTAs with optimized copy and placement can make all the difference to its UX, and ultimately conversions. For visitors to have a seamless experience, the copy of your CTA should be self-explanatory in terms of what the button is about, and it should be placed in a way that visitors and users do not have to struggle to locate it. 

Using heatmaps, UX designers and analysts can identify if the main CTAs are indeed getting traction or not, identify elements on the page is getting clicked on if not the CTA, if the CTA copy is compelling enough or not, if the CTAs below the fold are getting enough attention or not, and much more. For instance, SaaS demand generation teams can quickly scan through their resource page’s heatmap to see if the CTA with the download link to their blockbuster ebook that cost them thousands of Dollars and a whale of their time is getting clicks or not.

And all these insights can be unearthed by studying the on-site behavior of existing visitors, thereby eliminating the need for investing in acquiring new traffic.

Navigation

Flawed navigation with multiple friction ares or one that does not match visitor expectations calls for an experience breakage and hence a bad UX. When visitors have to struggle to find what they came looking for on your website or when the navigation flow demands higher cognitive load on the part of the visitors, frustration ensues, leading to visitors dropping off without converting.

Heatmaps can help you track and analyze visitors’ navigational patterns so that you can construct a navigation map that matches visitor expectations. Website heatmaps also equip you with data that helps identify missing/broken links as well as redundant ones that affect the overall navigation of your digital property. 

For instance, an eCommerce website’s UX team can analyze their homepage’s heatmap to ascertain the discoverability of the navigation bars and icons on it and analyze the ease with which visitors are able to move from point A in their journey to point B as well as identify potential distractions.

In fact, the above heatmap is from a test that Galeton ran on its website’s navigation bar. Testing ideas based on the insights collected using heatmaps, Galeton optimized their navigation and witnessed a 14% increase in sitewide conversion rate.

Images and Text

Images and text comprise the major part of a website’s design. The challenge here arises when these two elements are not at their most optimized forms in terms of conversion driving quality and placement. 

Using heatmaps, you can identify the most popular section of a web page and place the most critical text and images in those sections. Using mouse tracking heatmap, you can follow the movement pattern of visitors’ cursor and discover if the copy is confusing based on the cursor’s hovering pattern. Using clickmaps, you can identify areas where users click the most, where they expect a certain image to be, identify images that are expected to be hyperlinked, and more. Using eye tracking heatmaps, you can gather data on visitors’ gaze length and frequency and find out where visitors are looking at the most, which images catch their attention, which text makes them linger around longer, and so on.

For instance, the above image shows the heatmap of 2 different ad versions of the same product. A quick comparison of the two heatmaps can tell designers and marketers that in the second design where the endorser is looking directly at the product, the latter attracts more visitors as compared to the first design. Even the copy in the second design gets more traction than in the first design.

The list of use cases can go on, but the bottom line is that website heatmaps help you unravel the dynamic and ever-changing universe of visitors’ needs and behavioral trends.

Page Length

Nobody likes scrolling endlessly on their phones or desktops looking for something on one single website. This being said, every business is different, with each of their websites flaunting unique goals. Hence, the page length always depends on the goal/s that particular web pages or websites aim to achieve. 

Scrollmaps can be of ginormous assistance when determining the page length for your website

For instance, using scrollmaps, blogging and publishing websites can identify the sections of a page where visitors are scrolling to the most, pinpoint the fold beyond which visitors don’t bother scrolling or which witnesses highest number of bounce-offs, gauge the readability or traction that the below-the-fold content warrants, discover false floor, and much more. They can ascertain the ideal length for their blogs and articles by leveraging such actionable insights that website heatmaps arm them with.

Download Free: Website Heatmap Guide

Overall Page Layouts

Testing every element in silos and ensuring that each of them works does not necessarily mean that each of these elements works together as well. 

You may have a world-class product or service, you may even have the best copy written for its website, and the most appropriate images shortlisted. This does not automatically mean that all of these will work together – your copy may be compelling, but the image next to it may hijack all the eyes; your product page may be splendid in terms of product images and specifications, but the CTA button may be hard to find; you may also strike the right balance between the various elements on your page but too many folds prevent most visitors from reaching the main CTA at the bottom – the list can go on.

By highlighting the most and least popular sections of a page, by equipping you with actionable insights on possible experience breakages, website heatmaps help you place important information in the most popular sections and design the perfect layout for high converting landing pages, homepage, checkout page, product page, and so on.

How Heatmaps Came to Dictate UX in Omnichannel Experiences?

There is no second-guessing that the credit for the dominance of website heatmaps when it comes to designing for a stellar UX majorly goes to the incomparable, quality insights on visitors’ on-site behavioral trends that they arm marketers and UX designers with. But, there is another element at play here that appears to be slowly becoming a major contributor to this dominance, namely omnichannel experience. 

The aggregate experience that a website delivers to each visitor, across devices is an omnichannel experience.

That being said, we live in an age where each individual can own a  desktop, a mobile phone, a tablet, or any other device all at the same time. And they use all of these devices to browse through different websites and sometimes, the same website using different devices. In a conundrum like this, where there is no certainty about which device a visitor starts their journey on, and on which they end it, it becomes imperative that the interface be designed in such a manner that each element is in its most optimized form (as far as visitor expectations are concerned) and is consistent in delivering a good user experience throughout the journey, across devices. 

Delivering a good omnichannel experience to each visitor has become everything now, and this is why website heatmaps have gained a further impetus into assuming a pivotal position in the entire UX designing process. With its ability to track and visualize user behavior data on each device type individually as well as the ability to create aggregate heatmaps of data from all devices combined, website heatmaps empower you to collect, visualize, and analyze data from multiple devices in a way that best suits your roadmap to achieving your UX goals.

Conclusion

That website heatmaps became an analytical frontrunner in the entire process that goes behind designing for spectacular UX comes as no surprise. When combined with A/B testing, its ability to enable marketers and designers to step into their target audience’s and visitors’ shoes to test and build the website experience from the latter’s POV makes website heatmap a highly valuable and indispensable analytics tool. With the entry of testing in the picture, the Heatmap-UX duo only got stronger. It is only a matter of time that like CRO and UX/UI, website heatmaps will come to assume central positions in other fields of the online world as well.

Understand visitor behavior analysis in detail with this video.

FAQs on Heatmaps for UX

For instance, website heatmap dashboards allow users to access the report for a page and apply segments to look at data for specific visitor groups, and stock index heatmap dashboards allow you to configure the data you want to be plotted on the heatmap based on industry, time/duration, and so on.

Download Free: Website Heatmap Guide

Tools and examples of heatmap dashboard

If heatmaps lacked reporting dashboards, it wouldn’t be possible to leverage one of its most important benefits – the ability to deep dive into large data sets without having to go through each one of them. A look at some existing heatmap dashboards will give you an idea about their importance:

VWO Insights’ website heatmap tool

Online businesses get visitors and customers from across the world, falling in different age groups, belonging to different sexes, having different interest areas, different pain points, and so on. So, the data matrix involved is enormous, which, without heatmaps, would warrant the use of the bandwidth of multiple resources, sometimes, hours on end.VWO Insights’ website heatmap tool helps businesses gather and visualize visitor behavior data. Users can deep dive into the data with its segmentation and targeting capabilities. In addition, VWO’s free AI-powered heatmap generator allows you to predict how visitors interact with your web page. It enables you to gauge bottlenecks based on user experience for you to take required optimization measures.

Heatmap dashboard example for a website

Let’s look at VWO Insights’ heatmap dashboard to gauge the information and configurations website heatmap dashboards entail.

VWO’s heatmap dashboard allows you to configure your heatmap’s setting, enables data collection for heatmaps, view the heatmap of the URL you want, view segment-specific data, filter heatmap based on your requirements, and create multiple views. 

That’s not all!

The dashboard also lets you stop the heatmap by pausing data collection, clear existing data from the heatmap using the ‘Flush All Data’ option, and share the report directly from your user account in a single click.

By providing room for so many actions in one single dashboard, heatmap tools like VWO Insights’ heatmap eliminate hours of manual effort that would have otherwise gone into doing all of the above.

Watch the video to get an overview of VWO Heatmaps:

iCharts stock index heatmap tool

The iCharts free heatmap tool helps stock analysts create heatmaps of current market trends and analyze them with ease.

Heatmap dashboard example for a stock index

iCharts has a unique variation of the dashboard. On the one hand, on the top of the page, it allows users to customize the heatmap based on the indices and industry you want to visualize in it. You can also choose what trend you want to visualize: whether you want to plot the ‘Gainers to Losers’ trend or ‘Major to Minor Moves’. And, on the other hand, on hovering over a data point, a report pops up reflecting the data point’s symbol, full name, sector, and previous close value, current price, and the difference between the two.

As can be seen above, iCharts allows users to view the data they want by allowing them to configure the heatmap, while, at the same time, giving a performance report of each data point. iCharts’ dashboard empowers users to know the performance of each data point in the matrix, draw comparisons, and narrow down on the relevant data points – all on the same page.

Download Free: Website Heatmap Guide

TheSmallman heatmap excel dashboards tool

Thesmallman.com is a lab for Excel ideas that contains information on dashboards, charting, financial modeling, VBA, and training. It also offers various courses on building dashboards for various industries and their use cases.

Heatmap dashboard example for an excel

Excel is a powerful tool for generating heatmaps. TheSmallman has some ready-to-use heatmap dashboard templates and also offers courses on how to build your own excel heatmap dashboard. Look at this dashboard template that can be used for creating Excel heatmaps:

The above dashboard allows you to change the full heatmap view simply by changing the selection in the dropdown on the left that reads ‘Avg Salary’. On changing the selection on this dropdown from ‘Avg Salary’ to ‘Unemployment’, the map as well as the charts on the right changes accordingly. All you need is to feed in the correct data, and voila:

Such a dynamic and well-configured heatmap dashboard empowers businesses to visualize gigantic data matrices on one Excel and also filter and configure data as per requirement. 

Conclusion

As can be seen from the above tools and examples of heatmap dashboards, a heatmap is incomplete without a dashboard. If heatmaps solve one pain point for its users, i.e., visualizing complex data sets in an easy to consume manner, heatmap dashboards solve the flipside of this coin—they make data interpretation and analysis of complex data sets simpler. Heatmap dashboard enables you to configure the data you want to visualize, narrow down and dive deep into data segments that are of high business priority, and draw data-backed conclusions from the same. 

FAQs on heatmap dashboard

Ask any marketer worth their salt, and they’ll emphasize the pivotal role of user behavioral insights in their work. And why wouldn’t they? User behavior is unique to each website and each brand. How visitors engage with your website may differ significantly from how they interact with your top competitors’ sites. Making sweeping generalizations from benchmarked reports is hardly possible. 

Download Free: Website Heatmap Guide

Understanding what your users want, identifying and eliminating the friction they face, and enhancing their experience with YOUR product become possible when you analyze their actions on your website. That’s where heatmaps – an incredible usability testing method – shine bright! Heatmap solutions show captivating visual representations that provide magnificent insights into every movement of your users without overwhelming you. 

Experimenting with heatmap tools is an excellent starting point for user research. It enables you to make data-driven decisions and optimize the performance of digital properties. To help you pick the best free heatmap tool, we’ve compiled a list of the top 8 heatmapping tools for you to get started. 

[Read this extensive guide on Website Heatmaps]

VWO Insights

VWO Insights distinguishes itself by offering a comprehensive suite of user behavioral analysis tools, including powerful heatmaps. Even in its free starter plan, you can analyze unlimited heatmaps. Additionally, you can leverage click maps that track visitors’ clicks on specific elements on a web page. It is called one of the best heatmap tools for a reason, right?

Have you noticed something insightful about visitor or user interaction here on your website? Add it as an observation with automatically attached heatmap screenshots. This feature makes future heatmap analysis for testing and further in-depth analysis super convenient. Plus, Insights supports seamless cross-device tracking, allowing you to view heatmaps from desktop, mobile, and tablet.

Other key features – Session Recordings, Surveys, Form Analytic, Funnels

Free plan – For those looking to dip their toes into the world of behavioral analytics, VWO Insights’ free Starter plan is an ideal choice, accommodating up to 5,000 monthly tracked visitors. Of course, as and when your business scales and requirements grow, you can switch to any of VWO’s paid plans of Insights and capitalize on several other advanced features like A/B testing of variation heatmaps, view heatmaps of intractable elements like pop-ups and modals, download for offline viewing, and so on. Check out more about pricing and plans now. 

Free trial – Sign up for a full 30-day free trial to explore our range of heatmap features, from basic to advanced. But that’s not all! You can also set up funnels to allow visitor data collection, track your visitors’ progress toward a goal, analyze web forms at a field level, and even conduct surveys to gather valuable user feedback. Our free trial covers insights (including heatmap software tools, of course) for mobile apps too! If you find yourself loving all these amazing features, you might just discover that upgrading to a paid plan is worth it!

Microfocus, an FTSE 250 software group, used VWO Insights’ heatmaps, scroll maps, and session recordings, for qualitative analysis of their home page and product pages. They made the below observations that later, upon A/B testing, led to a 12.37% increase in form sign-ups from their website:

• Not showing asterisk marks on mandatory fields on the sign-up form was probably a cause for low conversion rates.
• The CTA for the Free Trial page was below the fold, probably leading to low conversion rates.
• Their marketplace domain did not have product linkage to specific apps and hence was not sending traffic to Micro Focus product pages (revenue pages).

Still not sure if this is the right tool for you? Go ahead and evaluate VWO Heatmaps for free to see if it ticks off the boxes in your checklist using the free trial.

Watch how to fuel more experiments with heatmap data:

Microsoft Clarity

Microsoft Clarity has got you covered with an array of visitor behavioral tools, and the best part? It’s absolutely free forever! With clickmaps, you can easily identify the areas on your pages that generate the most engagement. Scrollmaps, on the other hand, give you insights into how far your visitors scroll on a web page. And if you want to know where the action is happening, area heatmaps reveal the total clicks in specific areas, helping you identify popular click zones on your website. This heat mapping software also supports cross-device viewing of heatmaps and makes sharing with your team quite simple. 

Other key features – Session recordings tool, Insights, Clarity extension, and CoPilot. 

Currently, it doesn’t allow you to analyze heatmaps for interactive elements like pop-ups and modals. Further, you are also not able to view heatmaps for a web page that requires login or has dynamic URLs. 

Free plan – Microsoft Clarity is an entirely free heatmap tool. 

Download Free: Website Heatmap Guide

Hotjar

Hotjar is one of the impressive website heatmap tools for diving deep into visitor behavioral research. This great tool supports analysis of scroll maps and clickmaps apart from enabling cross-device viewing of all maps. Heatmaps are easily shareable, but the absence of the feature of jotting down observations can limit your chance to share your insights and brainstorm within the team. In fact, the feature to note observations with automatic screenshots and view click areas do not exist even for paid plans in this heatmap tracking tool. 

Other key features – Recordings, Feedback, Surveys, and Interviews.

Free plan – With the free basic plan, you can benefit from up to 35 daily sessions.

Free trial – You can start 15-day trials for Plus and Business paid plans. To sign up for the trial of the Scale plan, you have to reach out to their sales team. 

SmartLook

SmartLook is one of the must-have heatmap tools making waves in the industry. It lets you analyze all three types of heatmaps – clickmaps, movement heatmaps, and scroll maps. While you can avail of cross-device viewing of heatmaps through the free version, the tool does not let you share and download them. SmartLook offers integrations with third-party testing solutions to support your online experiments. But the downside is that you are reliant on these integrations and unable to view heatmaps of the testing variations directly within this heatmap software tool. 

Other key features – Events, Session recording tool, funnels, and crash reports. 

Free plan – SmartLook’s free plan is best for anyone who wants to explore it for personal use. To use it within a team, you’ll have to switch to either the Pro plan or Enterprise plan to use more advanced heatmap features. 

Free trial – All paid plans offer a 30-day trial period. 

Mouseflow

Mouseflow is powered with an advanced heatmap feature set, including click, scroll, movement, geo, and attention. Rightly called one of the sought-after website heatmap tools, it goes the extra mile to show you friction scores to flag areas that visitors have trouble interacting with and can be improved. You can also share heatmaps and session recordings within your team. What Mouseflow does not offer is element list reports that show a unified view of clicks on each element of a particular web page, including links, headers, list items, etc. 

Other key features – Session replay tool, funnels, forms, and user feedback. 

Free plan – Mouseflow’s free plan provides you with 500 recordings every month and unlimited pageviews. 

Free trial – You get a 14-day free trial for all paid plans.

Lucky Orange

With Lucky Orange, you gain access to dynamic heatmaps, allowing you to explore not just static areas of your website but also dynamic elements like modals and pop-ups. Plus, you can deep-dive into the performance of each web page with element analytics. Deep segmentation allows you to analyze and compare visitor behavior across traffic sources and marketing campaigns. However, this heatmap tool lacks project management capabilities that enable users to jot down observations about heatmaps for further analysis. 

Other key features – Sessions Recordings, Surveys, Conversion funnels, Form Analytics, and Live Chat.

Free plan – Lucky Orange’s free plan supports 500 page views per month for unlimited team members. Plus, you can get access to all integrations within this plan. 

Free trial – A 7-day free trial is available for the free plan and all paid plans.

FullStory

FullStory lets you track mouse movements to analyze all three types of maps representative of visitor behavior – heatmaps, scrollmaps, and clickmaps. Through session replays, you can also step into visitors’ shoes and identify the problems they face on your website. You can also easily create a note at an important moment during a session replay and generate a link to the replay to share it with your team. Integrations with third-party testing tools allow you to use observations made on FullStory to run tests and improve conversion rates. 

Other key feature groups – Product analytics and Complete Data Capture (DX Data Engine)

Free plan – When you sign up for a free trial, you’ll get a 14-day trial of FullStory’s Business edition with up to 5,000 sessions. During the trial, you can switch to a Free plan or contact us to explore the best plan for your business.

Free trial – The free trial is only available for the Business plan. There is no free trial for Enterprise and Advanced plans. 

Inspectlet

Inspectlet’s free plan lets you access its entire suite of heatmap software tools that cover eye-tracking heatmaps, click heatmaps, and scroll heatmaps. With this tool, you can capture videos of your website visitors in action, providing a comprehensive view of their interactions. 

Other key features – A/B testing, Feedback tools like surveys, Form analytics tools, and Error Logging 

Free plan – Inspectlet has a free plan offering 25,000 pageviews per month. 

Free trial – Not sure if they offer a free trial period. 

With the right tool, plunge into visitor insights that are worth their weight in gold

All impressive heatmap tools, right? Selecting the best free heatmap tool can be tough with so many amazing choices. Our recommendation? Give VWO Insights a try. It offers a feature-packed heatmap suite along with funnel analysis, survey, goals, and more. When you select a comprehensive conversion rate optimization platform that integrates experimentation, insights, plan, and CDP, your experiments can drive significant results. So, are you ready to kick-start your user research with this best free heatmap software? Sign up for a free trial and watch the results. Wishing you a treasure trove of user insights to propel your business to growth and success!

FAQs on heatmap tools

Download Free: Website Heatmap Guide

To help you navigate through this decision, listed below are some of the parameters that your heatmap software should meet:

Easy to Use

The first criterion that good website heatmap tools should meet is the ease of deployment and use. Website heatmap users do not just comprise of technically skilled personnel but marketers & UX professionals who come from all walks of life. Hence, while choosing software for your heatmapping exercise, you need to make sure that even a layman, with minimum technical prowess, can use it with ease and navigate their way through it without much struggle. 

Imagine having to run to your developers and technicians team every time the software glitches or every time you are unable to fix something or configure something in it due to the level of technical expertise the tool demands. This wouldn’t just consume your technical team’s bandwidth but also be unable to run campaigns without any dependency on other teams.

Does Not Affect Website’s Speed

Third-party codes and website speed tend to have an inverse relationship: the more third-party codes you have installed on your website, the slower your website speed can get. The heatmap tool you decide to install onto your website should be lightweight. Meaning, its code snippet should not be so heavy that it ends up compromising your website’s load speed.

If this happens, you may lose out on potential customers who get frustrated by how slow your website pages load and leave the website without converting. Or worse, the webpages may keep loading or crashing, and deliver bad user experience, thereby defeating the very purpose of employing a heatmap.

Supports Browsable Heatmaps

Browsable heatmaps let you access pages behind logins and situational pages, and interact with the page as the heatmap is viewed. Pages behind logins are pages like account page, profile, and so on that require the user to log in. Situational pages are pages that are visible when a certain event is triggered.


For instance, on an eCommerce website, the cart page may only be visible once one or more item/s are added to the cart. These are pages with dynamic URLs and are unique for each individual user. The inability to track visitor behavior patterns on these pages means a huge part of your heatmapping exercise is missing in action.

Records Behavior at the Element Level

Good website heatmap tools record behavior not just on the page level but on the element level as well. Tracking and recording clicks at the element level equips you to handle responsive web designs better and also improves support on multiple devices of varying screen sizes and resolutions.

Tracks Clicks on Hidden Elements Too

Make sure that the tool that you choose tracks clicks on hidden elements that are triggered by hover actions and click actions. These can be drop-down menus, collapsible navigation bar, and so on. The inability to track click and scroll behavior on these elements have the same effect as the inability to browse login and situational pages mentioned in the point above.

Allows Post-campaign Segmentation

A good website heatmap tool isn’t one that lets you segment visitors for targetting only before launching the heatmapping campaign. In addition to it, the software should also enable post-campaign segmentation so you can easily compare behavior between different visitor groups. This enables you to identify visitor segments that exhibit the same behavioral pattern, thereby enabling you to come up with personalized fixes for those segments.

Enables Share/Download for Collaboration

Every new set of eyes can potentially bring a new angle or a new piece of otherwise unearthed insights into notice. That is why you should always make sure that the heatmap tool that you select allows you to download the resultant heatmap report and has sharing options. This ensures that there is greater collaboration in the team, both within and without, and that too with increased ease.

Is Adaptable to Change

This is an age where technology has almost taken over humans in may fields, and a lot of manual work has now been automated. Devices today come with varying screen sizes, display dimensions, operating systems, features offered, and so on. This is accompanied by new updates being pushed, be it for the devices’ operating systems, the applications installed in those devices, as well as the websites that are accessed using those devices.

With change becoming the new constant, good heatmap tools should also be agile. They should be able to adapt to every new change being made in digital properties. Failure to do so may result in the tool you chose becoming obsolete as the world around it is continuously changing. 

Download Free: Website Heatmap Guide

List of Free Website Heatmap Tools

It is always daunting to install a third-party code to your website, which is why many end up deciding against using website heatmaps. This is especially true when this fear is accompanied by a huge investment that most of the available software demands.

So, before making this investment, and committing to one website heatmap tool right away, it is always a good idea to try out some free options that are available or take up free trials of tools that are expensive yet the best in the market.

To help you start off, listed below are some website heatmap tools that you can take out for a spin before committing to one tool:

ClickHeat

ClickHeat is a fairly simple OpenSource clickmap tool that visually represents hot and cold click areas of your webpage. Its code is available on GitHub, and all you need to do is clone it or download it from ZIP archive. It is free for unlimited use.

MetricBuzz

MetricBuzz is another free option, but the only problem with this free tool is that it itself relies on scripts that are hosted on third-party sites.

VWO Insights

VWO Insights is part of our experience optimization platform that offers heatmaps along with other visitor insight capabilities.
Although VWO Insights is a paid product, it offers a trial where you can explore the heatmap tool, and also use it in combination with VWO’s other offerings. Try free!

FAQs on Website Heatmap Tools