One of the most popular tools for helping to improve websites is Hotjar. You have probably heard about it or maybe you are even using it already. Just like UNGUESS, it helps you gain feedback from your visitors and customers. But just how different are they?
In this article you will learn the differences between the tools, and why you might need them both to get the best results for improving your digital product.
What is Hotjar?
It offers several tools to help you analyze and gain feedback from your users. It offers:
- Heatmaps: For discovering what your visitors are clicking on on your website
- Session recording: For watching your visitors move around your website
- Surveys: For asking written questions to your customers and website visitors
- Incoming feedback: For gaining quick feedback and bug fixes from your visitors
As you can see, it’s got some very useful features for helping to understand your users, but let’s see in detail the differences with UNGUESS and its active analysis features.
What Hotjar doesn’t have that UNGUESS offers
We can definitely say that Hotjar represents a very important part of user research, but there are several essential user feedback features it is missing that are vital for gaining a better and more detailed understanding of your users main issues and needs.
So let’s see what UNGUESS offers more than Hotjar.
- Hotjar doesn’t offer user testing
In a few simple words, with Hotjar you can’t do user testing which is a very important part of user research, you can’t actually listen to someone using your website and ask them questions while they do so (for example Thinking Aloud User Testing methodology).
This user testing is essential for discovering their issues, doubts, frustrations, needs and desires. Once you know that it’s like a goldmine of website improvement ideas.
And if you do moderated user testing, you can take this a step further by actually seeing and talking live with your target audience which is ideal for getting really detailed insights and feedback.
2: Hotjar surveys have no demographic filters to find your target audience
Hotjar lets you survey your customers or visitors, but it doesn’t help you find and survey people who have never seen your website and products before. Even their visitor surveys could be answered by people who have already seen your website before, and give biased feedback.
You really need first impression feedback from your target audience who haven’t seen your website before, particularly because visitors can judge your whole website in just 10 seconds. So this is something important that Hotjar doesn’t offer that UNGUESS does. In fact, UNGUESS can leverage a community of millions of users that can be filtered by tens of different demographic assets (gender, job title, the bank they use, where they are, if they own a dog, etc.)
3: Hotjar session recordings give no audio or feedback
With UNGUESS you get recordings with audio of your target audience using your website, answering questions and tasks you want them to complete.
On Hotjar you only get recordings of users moving through your website and no audio feedback. That is useful for finding different issues, but you are left guessing why they left your website or why they couldn’t find the product they wanted. And you certainly can’t ask them what their issues or doubts are, and what their needs and desires are. That’s why you need user testing that UNGUESS offers.
And there is also one other difference.
Hotjar requires a monthly subscription. UNGUESS doesn’t.
They offer a free plan, but to get enough results to analyze on your website you really need one of their premium plans. UNGUESS is simpler - you can choose to pay for user tests as you go, and we don’t force you to pay a subscription or monthly fee.
Wrapping up
So as you can now hopefully understand, Hotjar and UNGUESS are website feedback tools that complement each other very well. Hotjar offers you a passive and quantitative analysis while UNGUESS an active and qualitative one.
You really need both to maximize the amount and the quality of feedback you are getting from your visitors and customers. This feedback will give you much better website improvement ideas that will quickly increase your conversion rates and revenue.
There is no good or bad, you need both, and whilst the complexity of the quantitative approach might be strongly influenced by technicalities and preferences of the team itself (what tool we want, what visualization we prefer, what can we or can't integrate), on the other hand, qualitative research has the really hard task to bring you the right people, helping you in replying to the following doubts:
- Are you sure you are able to talk to your real user autonomously?
- Are you sure you are able to ask questions without leading them?
So when you want to know if something is happening you can rely on tools like Hotjar,but when you want to know why is happening and how to improve, you need to go with UNGUESS.