How Can Heatmaps be Used to Improve Web Design?

Heatmaps have been around, in very basic form, since the late 1800s. Thanks to advancements in technology, computer heatmapping became available in the early 1990s, when a tool was created to display real time financial market information.

It used a number of different colour schemes, including rainbow and grey-scale. Rainbow maps are preferred, as it is easier to perceive shades of colour than grey. Most tools show warm colours, such as orange and red, to represent popular or most used sections, while blues and purples represent less used sections.

What Do Heatmaps Show?

Heatmaps help you visually understand your visitors reactions on the different pages of your website, helping with easy analysis. It helps you gather valuable user insights, helping you improve your website design to meet visitors expectations, increasing conversion rates, and reducing bounce rates.

In most cases, they show clicks and taps on your web page with each page element colour coded according to popularity. The most clicked or tapped elements of the website are bright red, while the less clicked elements will be blues or cool colours.

When used on websites, heatmaps help you fully understand your users behaviour, helping you optimise your website for success. You get a better understanding of your website with elements not tapped or clicked on needing a new design, in order to improve engagement.

Different heatmaps help to understand different website elements. In addition to click and scroll maps, there are also error maps, dead click maps, and more.

How Heatmaps Benefit Your Web Design

When using heatmaps you can determine if:

• Visitors are having trouble seeing CTAs
• Important content on your page is not attracting visitors
• Your visitors are experiencing problems on their browser or device
• Non clickable elements are distracting your visitors, negatively impacting conversions

Who Benefits from Website Heatmaps?

Due to the range of data that can be gained, heatmapping software benefits teams in various departments:

• UX Designers – used to test and understand if content inspires visitors to take action, identifying their behaviour, and determining if CTAs are well-placed
• Digital marketers – gaining valuable insights into website traffic, understanding parts of a web site that users are drawn to, along with elements on the page that are being ignored.
• Digital analysts – heatmaps provide depth and context to analysis

Conclusion

Heatmaps are valuable software tools used in the digital marketing environment to provide useful insights into your website pages and design. It provides a visualisation on what elements of your site are working and what areas need tweaking and adjusting. Through effective visualisation, you can learn user behaviour on your website, ensuring your CTAs are clearly visible and ensuring visitors are drawn to useful information. It helps improve your design, along with user experience, helping to improve conversions.