Touch Heatmaps: What are they and how can they help?

Usability testing is no longer limited to traditional methods and techniques such as questionnaires and interviews. Thanks to touch heatmaps, you can get a visual picture of how users are experiencing your app.

When talking about mobile apps, app usability is the deciding factor for the success of an app. This is where Heatmaps come into play.

Keep reading so you can understand what it is, and how you can take advantage of it to improve your app usability.

What are Touch Heatmaps?

A heatmap is a data analysis and visualization tool. Like how a population map is used to represent distributions and densities of population within a particular location with specific colors. Touch Heatmap is also used to show the areas where users frequently interact with by clicking, touching, or dragging, etc. A color spectrum ranging from blue (low interactions) to red (high interactions) is used to reflect the intense of interactions.

Why Touch Heatmaps are Important for Every App Developer?

The real test of an app is how easily can users carry out a task by interacting in the right way - touching, swipe up, swipe right, clicking twice, etc .. -

Here comes the advantage of using touch heatmaps to reveal the interaction patterns of your users, Heatmaps are graphical representations. This means that they are much easier to interpret than other tools that require sophisticated analytical knowledge to understand the data.

While surveys and interviews are great tools to glean all kinds of insights, they are prone to bias. Using heatmaps can give you richer user insights without a hurdle.

How to Use HeatMaps to Improve Your App Enagegment?

Heatmaps are highly useful when it comes to understanding how users experiencing your app. Heatmap can show you which area get the most attention (sweet spot) so you can place your CTAs, and which don’t get any clicks at all. Plus, you can also see if users are trying to click an element that’s not clickable, which indicate design flaws. hence allowing you to make data-driven decisions to optimize your app usability for further engagement

It’s important to note the fact that while heatmaps are a good way to find out what your app users are doing, it might be challenging to draw any conclusions solely based on heatmap data. To find the reason behind any unexpected behavior, then you have to use other tools to understand the full story of user interaction.

Tools for Creating Heatmaps

  • Uxcam – is a tool that enable app developers to discover issues and problems in their apps with the ultimate goal of eliminating user struggle and improving usability.

  • Userexperior – Mobile app Session Replay and Heatmap analysis tool, that helps you monitor and improve user experience

  • Contentsquare – is a user experience (UX) analytics and optimization platform that empowers brands to increase their customer engagement and conversion across every digital channel.

In Conclusion

There’s no doubt that improving the usability, and efficiency of user interactions on your app enhances the satisfaction of users. Happy users means higher retention rates. Although heatmaps are aone of the most powerful and efficient diagnostic tools to spot problematic areas, they have their own limitation so it is crucial to pair your heatmap tool with other analytics or feedback tools to get deeper and reliable actionable insights.