Heatmap

A Heatmap is a visual representation of data that uses color coding to indicate areas of a webpage or app that receive the most user interactions, such as clicks, taps, or mouse movement. Heatmaps help designers understand user behavior by highlighting popular content, overlooked areas, and overall engagement, allowing for design optimizations.

Heatmaps are one of the fastest ways to invalidate design assumptions — you discover that users are clicking on non-interactive elements (suggesting they expect something there), ignoring buttons you thought were prominent, or rage-clicking in frustration. Tools like Hotjar or FullStory make heatmaps accessible to any team, and reviewing them before a redesign often reveals obvious fixes that don't require user research.

A SaaS company reviewing their pricing page heatmap discovered that users were repeatedly clicking on the plan names in the comparison table, expecting them to be links to more detail — a signal to add expandable feature explanations that reduced sales call questions about plan differences.