How Do Heatmaps Work to Improve an App? What You Need to Know

Did you know that 90% of app users have admitted that they have stopped using an app due to poor performance?

That makes it crucial to optimise the user experience for your app.

One way to improve the experience based on real analytics is by incorporating heatmaps into your process. 

User heatmaps have the possibility to vastly improve your engagement, so we’re going to get straight to it and explain why you need to start using heatmap tools now.

Heatmaps are a visual representation of colours to display the movement of users. They represent the average activity of users on your app so you can see where the main focus points are and what is attracting their attention.

Our eyes are actually much quicker to comprehend information than our brains, so heatmaps are an effective way of displaying a complex amount of data.

We can’t possibly analyze numbers as quickly as an image so heatmaps do it for us. They aggregate all of the data from our app users and compile it into a colourful image. We then draw conclusions from this image to make decisions on user experience.

Heatmaps need a large amount of data if possible as they showcase data in extremes. We see where the most and least activity is happening on a page.

So heatmaps are simply a shortcut to valuable data insights for our brains.

Considering we spend up to 66% of our time on our phones in apps, it’s worth optimising the experience for users. Let’s leave them feeling good about your brand by using heatmaps to do the following:

Heatmaps can help you to organise design elements to encourage user behaviour. For example, imagine you look at a heatmap of your signup page that shows that people are using facebook log in the most. You could use that information to move the facebook signup to the top centre of the page.

Voila – an optimised experience for users. 

Think about the applications for doing this throughout your app. You users would have a seamless experience that feels natural, all because you’ve taken real users and applied their behaviour patterns to your app design. 

Are your CTAs attracting the right attention? If your heatmaps are showing a lack of clicks, perhaps there are too many CTAs? Maybe a lack of direction for the user? Try making subtle changes to see what could be stopping your user from clicking.

Or maybe you see users trying to click an image that doesn’t have a link. Maybe you could insert a link there to improve the user experience and flow of your app.

If you have features, links or text that just isn’t resonating with your audience you might want to think about removing it.

How do you know if it should be optimised or removed? Is it vital to the core function of the app or the behaviour you’re trying to drive? is it useful to the customer?

If the customer isn’t interacting with it then that is a huge indication that it isn’t adding value to your app.

Touch heatmaps can help you figure out the language that drives most action from your users. You could try the same action on different pages using different CTA language and see which one gets the best response.

Once you start using heatmaps to improve the CTA, design and usability of your app, engagement will follow. Apps that are easy to use are more likely to be popular with users. Sounds obvious, right?

These are a few of the ways in which heatmaps can improve the experience for your users, but how can you start using heatmaps today?

Let’s take a quick look at the heatmap tools that are out there.

There are various heatmap tools out there to help you incorporate heatmaps into your UX strategy. It’s a matter of deciding which additional features will be most helpful to your brand.

Not that you’ve learned about heatmaps and the best heatmap tools for app developers, it’s time to put your knowledge to good use.

Analytics is certainly not a one-size-fits-all field and you’ll need to discover what works best for your app. Decide which metrics are vital to your business and play around with the tools to find one that has the most impact on your ability to improve the UX.

Interested in improving other aspects of your app’s performance? Read all about how you can improve your SEO.

Or, contact us to find out how we can help optimise your app.