Product Manager, do you really understand heat maps?

Lei Feng: This article comes from the Growing IO team.

A picture is worth a thousand words! Product managers often use various charts to extract or express information. Heat maps are a common one. Especially in site management, interface optimization, interaction design, and other occasions, heat maps are widely used by product managers. However, product manager, do you really understand heat maps? What are the types of heat maps? What is the principle behind it? How can a product manager use a heat map? Today, we come to find out.

|   With so many heat maps, which product manager should you choose?

A heat map, also known as a heat map, is a graphical representation of a user's page click position or user's page position in a specially highlighted form. With heat maps, you can visually observe the overall user visits and click preferences.

Three different heat maps and principles

At present, there are mainly three kinds of heat maps: heat maps based on mouse click positions, heat maps based on mouse movement trajectories, and heat maps based on content clicks. The three heat maps have different principles and appearances, and the applicable scenarios are different.

1) A heat map based on the location of the mouse click (left in the figure above), such as the page click graph in Baidu's statistics, records the location where the user clicked on the screen resolution. However, the heat map based on the location of the mouse click does not track changes in the content, but records the absolute position of the mouse click in relative time.

2) Heat maps based on mouse movement trajectories (above in the figure above), such as foreign MoseStats, Mouseflow, etc., record the movements of the user's mouse, staying, etc. Heat maps are mostly trajectory forms. Similarly, the heat map based on the mouse movement trajectory does not track changes in the content, but simply records the absolute position of the mouse movement over time.

3) Heat maps based on content clicks (above right), such as Grwoing IO heat maps, record user clicks on web page content and automatically filter out invalid clicks on page margins (without content and links). Based on the heat map of content clicks, the most important feature is that heat map tracks changes in content and changes, and records the user's click preference over content over time.

Product Optimization and Heat Map Selection

The heat map based on the mouse click location and the heat map based on the mouse movement trajectory can reflect the user's click, move, and stay preferences of the mouse on the page position. The webmaster administrator, product manager, designer, etc. can utilize their access to the user. Preferences have a certain understanding.

However, the first two location-based heat maps often create confusion when product managers begin to optimize product designs. First, the dense heat map softens the effect, and the accurate information is not fully expressed. It is difficult for product managers to grasp the key points. The second is that the highlight color of the heat map conveys perceptual information and it is not easy to distinguish the specific values. Third, relative time, the heat map only records the click of the mouse on the absolute position, unable to track changes in the content.

More often than not, product managers and operators are more concerned with the user’s preference for clicks on different content (such as each article, each article, each picture, etc.) before they can be optimized in a targeted manner. The content-based heat map collects the user’s clicks on different content and filters out invalid clicks on the page (without content and links). And the heat map tracks changes in the content of the page and can adapt to the needs of frequent updating of many commercial websites.

After watching the heat map, how should the product be optimized?

Any tool should aim at improving work efficiency. As an important tool for data visualization, heat maps should help product managers quickly discover user behavior patterns and help product managers quickly optimize and iterate products. Based on the powerful "No Spot" data acquisition technology, the GrowingIO heat map clearly shows the user's click preferences on different pages of the content. So, how can a product manager use this powerful tool?

1. Is the user "wrongly clicking" or is the design unreasonable?

A SaaS product details its core features on the official website and sets up four functional categories on the home page. A lot of visiting users think that the function introduction can be clicked in, and then click on it, but they find no response at all. In fact, no link was set up for these four features. At the beginning, the product thinks this is a user's "mistaken click", but taking the custom analysis function as an example, looking at the detailed data, it is found that there are 1K-2K users click on this function every day on the workday.

Such a design is very unfriendly to the user experience, not only wasting user clicks, but also virtually reducing the user's access depth. The product manager can try to add a link to the feature details at that location to satisfy the user's curiosity or needs while increasing the depth of the user's visit.

2. How to optimize the content of a web page that is worth fighting for?

For sites with huge traffic (such as e-commerce sites, news and information sites, and portal sites), a small area on the page also means huge traffic and revenue. Heat maps help product managers quickly understand the user’s click preferences, and then quickly optimize content based on how many clicks are visited.

In order to make it easy for users to quickly find content, a technology blog has two sections on the right side of the page: popular articles and popular labels. Observe the content-based heat map and find that the popular tag below has more clicks than the popular article. Since users are not interested in the content recommended by our blog, are we considering optimizing content recommendations?

3. Are web pages of the same structure analyzed one by one?

Today's websites have a large number of pages of the same structure, such as e-commerce product pages, media information article pages, SaaS product backstage, and so on. Taking the merchandise page of the e-commerce website as an example, although the merchandise detail page has different merchandise information, the merchandise photos, inventory status, prices, product specification parameters, user reviews, shopping carts, and the like are all in the same location. The following figure shows an article page of a technology blog. Although the content of different articles is different, each page has a navigation element, a navigation bar, a popular article, a popular tag, and so on.

Through the path setting, the heat map under the original "...blog/article_1" path is wildly matched as "...blog/", and all blog posts are fuzzy matched with "". In this way, we can see the heat map effect across all blog article pages (above). With this convenient page setup, product managers can quickly analyze and optimize a large number of pages of the same structure.

| Product iteration, what heat can help?

"Bullying" is the pain of all product managers. It is a long, tedious, and inefficient process to raise demand, write code, return data, and do analysis. On the basis of the powerful "non-embedded" data acquisition technology, the heat map based on content clicks can intuitively display the user's click preference on the content of the page, allowing the product manager to understand the user's behavior at a glance.

There is a very popular concept in Lean Startup, the Minimal Feasibility Product (MVP), which emphasizes the rapid iteration of products through “validative learning”. The heat map is a very good tool. The product manager finds the problem in the heat map, makes assumptions, and then quickly experiments to validate or reverse our hypothesis. "Icy freezing three times, not a cold day." In the "idea-product-data" continuous iteration, the heat map should become a product manager's way of working!

Lei Feng network (search "Lei Feng network" public concern) Note: This article starting GrowingIO official blog, WeChat public number GrowingIO, the author of the publication posted Lei Feng network, reproduced please contact the authoritative, and retain the source and the author, not to delete the content.

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