by Gursharan Singh | Dec 3, 2021 | Development, Tips
For a second, imagine a hypothetical situation. You are helping your friend move out of a maze. He can see you but can’t hear you. Now, what will you do? Ofcourse, You will try to give him signs towards the end. Right?
There is a somewhat similar case with heatmaps and UX. Heatmaps help you identify UX obstacles that keep your friends (visitors) away from performing their end goals on your website. They offer precise customer-centric data, with which you can boost your website UX and convert visitors into leads.
In this article, you will learn:
- What are heatmaps?
- What are the most common types of heatmaps?
- How to boost your website UX using heatmaps?
Let’s jump right in.
What are Heatmaps?
Have you ever played a video game? If yes, then you must have seen an image like this:
This is a heatmap. Heatmaps are the visual representations of information about an area. The information and area vary depending on the goal of the heatmap.
In our case, the area is the website, and the information is – where users interact more, less, and none. It visualizes the data, which indicates how the site users interact on a page. To do this, it uses a simple color code: red for hot areas – areas that attract the reader’s interest, and blue for cold areas – neglected areas.
Simply put, the heatmaps of your website help you understand the course of your users on your web pages. They allow you to see:
- Where they click
- How far they scroll your pages
- What they are looking at
- What they ignore
Different types of heatmaps serve these different purposes.
FUN FACT: Parisian urban planning engineers were the first to use heatmaps. They used different colours to mark city maps to make statistical data clearer and more understandable.
What Are The Types of Heatmaps?
There are essentially three types of heatmaps. They are:
- Click tracking heatmaps
- Scroll maps
- Mouse tracking heatmaps
Let’s study all three in detail, after which we are going to learn how heatmaps can be used to improve UX. Let’s start with the types first:
Click Heatmaps
Click maps or click tracking heatmaps are the most commonly used heat maps. Click map is used to record the information about – ‘where your visitors have You don’t know, but your webpage may have a lackluster copy, a not-so-good image, or any other issue. clicked after reaching your landing page.’ Here’s an illustration that helps you understand the Click heat map more easily and better.
In the above image, you can see red spots on various areas. This is because the map uses different colours to display the clicking pattern. The red spots are the areas where the visitors have clicked the most. And as the number of clicks goes down, the colour of the spots becomes lighter.
It helps website owners determine whether their visitors are clicking on the areas they want them to or not. The number of clicks should be highest only on the CTA buttons of your landing page. If that’s not the case, you need to make your call to action buttons more attractive, easily accessible, and engaging enough for the visitors to click on them.
Scroll Maps
Like Click heat maps record the visitors’ clicks, Scroll maps record the scrolling behavior of the visitors.
This heat map tracks and shows how far users scroll your page and where they leave scrolling. It divides the web page into folds for better understanding. A fold is how much a webpage appears at once on the visitor’s screen (without scrolling below). Therefore, the scrolling heat map is widely used for long web pages with a lot of content.
The information it provides is very helpful. It helps you to check:
- Where did your visitors lose interest, and why?
- Whether users are missing your CTA because they’re positioned too low?
- Do you need to change the position of CTA?
Moreover, this scroll map helps to see if a web page’s length supports user experience or not. Here’s a good example of a scroll map:
The primary role of a scroll map is to figure out the areas of your page where users are abandoning the reading process. Using the information derived from this heat map, you can determine why the visitors are only scrolling through a certain point of your page and then perform AB testing to verify those reasons.
You don’t know if your webpage has a lacklustre copy, any image, or any other issue that’s turning your visitors off. But using scroll maps, you can figure out those issues and resolve them as soon as possible. As a result, it will increase your user engagement rate and thus your web sites’ UX.
Mouse Tracking Heat Maps
Mouse tracking or Mouse maps are the third most common type of heat maps. As the name indicates, the mouse heatmap shows the mouse movement of the visitors after landing on your webpage.
It reveals some interesting points on the way users read and navigate your webpage. However, there is one slight drawback with this heat map. You cannot completely rely on mouse movements. It’s not always like where the visitors are moving their cursor is where they are actually looking at.
So, just because if a visitor’s cursor stays on heading for 3 to 4 minutes, it does not mean they were reading it. Therefore, questions arise on the reliability of the mouse map data.
Google’s Doctor Anne did a research on the accuracy of this heat map. And here’s what she found:
- Only 6% of the total visitors showed a direct correlation between their eye movement and mouse movement. This means 94% of visitors did not correlate.
- 10% of visitors hovered over a specific page element while reading the rest of the content on that webpage.
- 19% of the visitors showed a horizontal correlation between their eye moment and mouse movement.
Here’s how a mouse map looks like:
Now, as you are familiar with the primary types of heatmaps, it’s time to share what you have been waiting for:
How to Use Heatmaps to Improve UX?
Heatmaps clearly tell a lot about your visitors’ movements on your websites. But how can you use the heat map’s data to boost your website’s UX? Below we have explained a few expert ways to serve this purpose:
Perform A/B Website Design Testing With Heatmaps
Using heat maps, you can understand your design’s usability. This helps you know which version of your web design will work best for your website. Heatmaps also give you insights into sub-optimal screens in your web design. For example, it tells:
- Whether visitors are scrolling upwards or downwards,
- They are reaching to call to action button or not;
- Which area of your webpage they are spending most of their time on.
Depending on the movement patterns of their cursors, you will learn whether visitors are spending more time with real engagement or out of confusion. Using all this data, you can create multiple designs and do this:
- First, perform AB testing of your designs using heatmaps.
- After that, pick the one that performs the best and continue optimizing it.
Performing AB testing using heat maps lets you see whether the visitors navigate straight to what they are looking for or if they get off-track. Even a single-second response delay in your design can dramatically impact the UX and cause a 7% reduction in conversions.
Learn Which CTA Button Gets Most Clicks
The performance of your call-to-action buttons is a crucial aspect of improving UX. Heatmaps help you evaluate it. With heatmaps, you can check which CTAs are getting clicks and which are ignored. Once you are aware of this data, you can adjust the CTAs accordingly to improve their performance. For example, if a CTA is being ignored by your visitors, you can try placing it in the most-clicked areas. That’s how you can improve the UX fast and efficiently.
Heatmap Highlights Items in Your Website That Creates Friction
88% of people do not return to a website if they have a bad user experience.
Have you ever visited a tough-to-navigate and confusing website? If yes, then you are already aware of the struggles of internet users. Do you want to offer the same inconvenience to your visitors?
Thankfully, using a heatmap, you can determine the spots in your website where visitors are facing troubles. Once you discover such areas, you can work on them to improve your UX. This way, you can use heat maps efficiently to offer your visitors clear navigation.
Use Heatmaps With UX Tools
Heatmap data is unquestionably amazing and gives plenty of insights. However, there’s a way to get more out of it – combine your heatmap with other UX design tools. Below are the best three duos:
Traditional Analytics + Heatmaps
Traditional analytics tools such as Google Analytics will provide you with plenty of quantitative data points. For example, bounce rates, traffic sources, and page views. However, these data points alone are not enough to improve your UX. When you combine Google Analytics with heatmap-provided insights, you’ll discover where your webpage is lacking and the solution to it.
Got a webpage with a good amount of traffic but a low conversion rate? Use a heatmap and Google analytics to figure out what’s making visitors leave. A combination of these amazing tools will help you improve your UX in a better way. Some examples are:
Session Replay + Heatmaps
Session replay is an amazing tool that lets you view your visitors’ activities. It shows all the actions of a visitor across multiple pages. Instead of guessing about scrolling and clicking, you use the combination of both these tools. They will help you find what your users are actually looking for. According to which you can make changes in your web pages, enhancing the UX.
On-page Feedback + Heat Maps
Numerical or quantitative data is highly important to make decisions about the UX. However, many people make the mistake of overlooking the value of this information. Try combining on-page feedback with heatmaps to get more detailed insights. Here’s what you need to do:
First, use a heatmap to determine the issues in your web page designs. Then to be sure about your chances, ask your visitors for UX feedback on each webpage.
According to BrightLocal, 72% of customers are more likely to write a review if a business asks for it.
Feedbacks will help you learn all things your visitors find missing on your page. You will know if the areas you wanted to update deserve changes or not. Once you know that, you can work on making the desired changes to make navigation easy. And if they are successfully reaching the right place without navigation, it means your navigation is efficient, and so does your UX.
However, remember that website feedback does not need to be distracting to the visitors. A non-intrusive, simple, and decent one-line question pole is all that’s required to kick-start your UX improvement.
That’s it. You are all set to leverage the power of heatmaps to give the best possible UX to your web guests. If you need any help, feel free to
DISCUSS YOUR QUERY WITH US
Operating in the field of Digital Marketing, SEO, PPC, and Content as well as embarking through the realms of Web Development – it has laid the foundations for the working of a well-oiled structure that runs smoothly in all the mentioned areas of expertise. My years of experience in finessing the art of delivering web pages with top search results, finding cost-effective ways to drive traffic to your websites in order to generate maximum leads has been paying off in multifold ways over the years.
I take immense pride in directing my team to deliver projects assessing quality and keeping up with the global market trends, without compromising on the integrity of the data being provided.
by Gursharan Singh | Nov 11, 2021 | Development, Tips, Web design
Do you know if you invest 1$ in UX, you get 9,900% ROI?
UI and UX are key concepts in digital marketing, but they are still unclear to many. And even those who know these concepts are unaware of the current UI and UX trends favored by internet users.
This post is helpful to all of them. Things we will cover:
- What is UI Design?
- What is UX Design?
- The Difference Between UI and UX Design
- UI and UX trends 2022
- Examples to understand how to implement these trends.
Let’s dive in.
What is UI Design?
The term UI Design ( User Interface Design ) refers to the design of a user interface. It is a key element taken into account in the process of creating a website. UI design includes all the graphic and textual elements that allow interaction between the user and the website.
It comprises all interactive and clickable items, such as the site navigation bar, buttons or links, text colors, and styles.
The main purpose of UI design is to offer a fluid and intuitive navigation to the user so that the user’s experience becomes as smooth as possible.
“A good UI is intuitive, easy to understand, and attractive. It encourages Internet users to continue their website navigation and to visit back to the site more often.”
What is UX Design?
UX – User experience relates to the experience of users on a website. It is quite similar to UI but goes further in the process. The user is at the heart of all design strategies. UX ensures that the website design is pleasant and easy to use for the user. Its main motive is to make usage of websites comfortable and satisfying for internet users.
Some of the important elements of the user experience are:
- Credibility of the website: company’s real identification, genuine reviews, no errors, etc.
- Website’s appearance and efficiency: consistency in design, placement of elements, etc.
- Easy to find the information sought: internal search engine, content categories, etc.
- Ease of use: for example, a smooth ordering process for an online store
- Responsive Website Design: The ability to adapt to the different gadgets: mobile, tablet, laptop, large screens, etc.
The Difference Between UI and UX Design
Do not confuse UX design and UI design. UX Design takes care of how users feel about a product, UI design focuses on its design.
UI Design
To put it simply: UI design = design of the user interface.
UI Design focuses on the aesthetic aspect of the interface. It uses technical skills to shape the visual elements of an app or website when designing them. So, it mainly deals with the graphic environment of a product/service, such as the font, the colors, the typography, the flow of images, the organization of the structure, etc.
Its role is to visually or significantly improve an interface – to make interactions more pleasant.
UX design
UX design relates to the feeling and satisfaction of the end-user in interaction with the website/application. Its goal is to guarantee the user a positive impression throughout their browsing. It helps to understand and anticipate user needs. Also, it helps to create a pleasant interface, intuitive and accessible to your target.
UI and UX Trends for 2022
1. Dark Mode
Most people favor websites/applications in dark mode. It is becoming immensely popular. Social networks were the first to offer this mode and make it popular with millions of Internet users. Twitter since 2016, Instagram since 2019, and, more recently, Facebook since 2020.
Operating systems have also given in to the call of dark mode: Windows 10 includes a native dark theme, just like macOS since 2018.
Benefits this mode offers
Energy-Saving:
Your device’s screen is one of the most power-hungry components. Dark mode saves energy savings, especially if you have an OLED screen. This is because dark-colored pixels consume less power than light-colored pixels, about 20% less.
“Google performed tests using YouTube in dark mode and found power savings of between 14% and 60% (depending on screen brightness).”
Enhance Text:
Dark colors enhance bright light colors. So your text in bright light colors becomes more catchy and easier to read. Moreover, dark mode makes it easier to read content in low light. It also produces less blue light than classic mode.
Eye- Friendly:
Dark Mode reduces eye fatigue by simplifying the hierarchy of content and minimizing visual distractions. It, therefore, helps prevent headaches or dry eyes to a certain extent during prolonged use of a screen. This helps reduce the negative impact of screens on the sleep cycle.
Some Dos and Don’ts About Dark Mode
Where should we use it?
For applications/websites focused on entertainment (Netflix, YouTube, Spotify)
On an interface that is used all day long (messaging, intranet)
For a site that needs to bring out an image of luxury.
On websites that need to play on emotions (for example, to bring out a feeling of intrigue and mystery.
Where shouldn’t you use it?
For interfaces heavily loaded with text.
On websites with numerous forms.
For sites with a design that is too complex (set of textures or range of colors).
Websites that have many different types of content displayed at the same time on the screen (text, images, video, tables, etc.).
Key Examples of Dark Mode
2. Create Unique Animation illustration
Have you ever clicked a button multiple times, just because you liked the animation it caused? Every three out of five people prefer doing so, including me.
With advancements in technology, designers can now integrate quality animations without worrying about the loading speed of the web pages. That’s why now the UX process includes animated UI graphic creation.
The Benefits of UI Animation Concepts
Makes Interaction Attracting And Fun:
It is often said that a picture is worth a thousand words. If a picture is worth a thousand words, imagine how many words it can be worth when it comes to life – animation. Using animation will allow you to present your brand in a fun way. Moreover, with animation, you can avoid long texts on your interfaces that often bore visitors.
Guides Visitors:
Animations also act as guides during navigation. It facilitates the presentation of your site or your application. They draw visitors’ attention to the next step in the navigation. Or to the various steps to follow.
Highlight Your CTAs:
Animation allows you to highlight your most important CTAs effectively. It is a good way to perfectly highlight the action to be performed. In addition, it ensures that the message you wanted to convey went well.
Provoke Interaction:
Our eyes always turn to light, movement, and sound. If you stare at an almost deserted landscape, the slightest movement will inevitably catch your eye, and you will more easily distinguish it from the rest. That’s how animation guides the user’s gaze to important points on the journey. A highlighted text, an image displayed gradually, will create an offset with the context/background and allow the desired element to be highlighted.
Pro Tip: Here’s a detailed guide on how to use animations.
Some key examples of Animation Integration
3. Advanced Micro-Interactions
According to Dan Saffer, creator of the term, the definition of a micro-interaction is:
“Small moments during which the user and the interface interact. “.
A micro-interaction is a creative, short, and simple event integrated into a web or mobile interface to give it a dynamic touch and stimulate user empathy. This feature is used to:
- Explain to the user the action to be performed.
- Inform the user about errors that may occur during the interaction.
- Guide the user in an intuitive way during his interaction with the interface.
- Attract the user’s attention.
- Reward the user.
- Provide an entertaining environment while the customer waits for the system to accomplish a task.
A micro-interaction is integrated into the interface design and has three main characteristics:
- A trigger such as a hover, a click, a scroll, or even a page display that generates an action;
- Rules that define what happens, such as zoom, a shade, or appearance;
- The feedback to inform the user of what is happening or where they are in a process;
- Loops and modes, like a system, repetition, or cancellation action.
Importance of Microinteractions
The micro-interactions play a critical role in your user interfaces. They stimulate the user’s emotions to personalize their interaction with the interface. These objects entertain the user and bring more life to the UX experience. As a result, micro-interaction helps to enhance the link between the user and the product.
Common Examples of Micro-Interactions
- Scrollbar
- Digital alarm
- Pull-to-refresh animation
- A loader with a progress indicator
- Swipe animation
- An animated Call To Action button
- Animated emoticons in social networks, etc.
- Email notification
The best-known example is the thumbs-up of Facebook Messenger:
4. Artificial Intelligence
Harry West, Director of Frog Design, says:
“Artificial intelligence is no longer a technology of the future. It is the present.”
Artificial intelligence is developing more and more in our daily life. For example, we have all been targeted by advertisements on search engines (Bing, Google), in mailboxes (Gmail Outlook), or even on social networks (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter). All because of AI.
Moreover, brands are considering how to further improve customer experience. The AI will be able to automate tasks thanks to predictive analyzes.
For example, chatbots on most websites allow users to get quick answers to their queries. The improvement of these bots will make it possible to advise better, which contributes to UX and also boosts conversions.
AI Components to focus on in UX
- Voice Search
- Chatbots
- Automation of tasks
- Personalization
- Advanced Visual Effects
You can read about these in detail in this UXmatter blog.
5. Scroll-Triggered Animation
In today’s highly competitive market, if you want to grow your business – you need to meet the changing expectations, behaviors, and interests of your audience. Scroll-triggered animation is a popular way to boost website interactions by improving the user’s interests.
Basically, it’s a technique to animate major elements of your website like – graphics, videos, photos, texts – giving them life as the user scrolls down a page. Scroll animations grab the user’s attention more easily – making your website appear more interesting, dynamic, and feel alive.
What Does It Look Like
The scroll-triggered animation has three main categories:
1. Moving The Background And Foreground – Also Known As The “Parallax” Animation: Parallax animation adds a sense of scale to a website. Combining multiple backgrounds offers an illusion of depth and directional navigation.
2. Animation Of The Elements When Comes Into View: When an element of a webpage comes into view, they start animating. For example, sliding texts, vibrating text, exploded view, self-filling graphs, etc.
3. The Scroll Triggered Video: A scroll-triggered video is a better and more visually exciting method than over-animated texts. With it, visitors can control the playback of the video as they scroll through your website.
Why Use it?
- It makes it easier for you to grab your user’s attention to specific areas of your website. For example, infographics, special offers, call to actions.
- Scroll-triggered animation also boosts user engagement by offering visitors an active user experience.
- It also affects the loading time of your web pages. Instead of waiting for the whole webpage to load, the scroll animation enables the loading of only those elements that are needed.
- Scrolling animations prevent the visitors from getting lost in your website, by making the navigation extremely streamlined.
6. Voice User Interface
Voice user interface VUI is a trend that has been dominating since the starting of 2021. Here are some stats that reflect the popularity of voice interface –
“Around 122.7 million Americans will be using the voice search interface till the end of 2021″
Voice user interface guides users and helps them navigate through complex digital products reducing the substantial assistance from other features like screens.
In fact, by the end of 2020, 30% of the total Google searches were projected to be made without screens (using VUI).
The most significant benefit of using VUI is – “it eliminates the need for a graphical user interface, and improves the user experience of your app or website. Let’s discuss more such benefits of the voice user interface trends.
Benefits Of Voice User Interface
- VUI makes multitasking easier. Users just need to command the request, while doing whatever they want, and it will be processed automatically.
- The users will feel more engaged with your website as their navigation will be easier. All they need to do is command and that’s it.
- It also helps you improve the speed recognition skills of your website – it impacts SEO positively.
- And many more.
7. Glass Morphism
.This trend is based on the effect, which we are sure you will be aware of, “background blur”. It creates a “through the glass” look and feel on the elements of your website. In other words, it makes your elements appear glass-looking translucent by providing them with a well-defined hierarchy.
This trend was introduced in Windows Vista first and then later in iOS7. Moreover, the new macOS update which is also called macOS Big Sur also implemented this style. If you want to get to know about this effect more deeply and practically, you can try out this tool “Glassmorphism Generator ”.
Wish To Integrate The Above Trends On Your Website?
“Discuss With Our Experts”
Operating in the field of Digital Marketing, SEO, PPC, and Content as well as embarking through the realms of Web Development – it has laid the foundations for the working of a well-oiled structure that runs smoothly in all the mentioned areas of expertise. My years of experience in finessing the art of delivering web pages with top search results, finding cost-effective ways to drive traffic to your websites in order to generate maximum leads has been paying off in multifold ways over the years.
I take immense pride in directing my team to deliver projects assessing quality and keeping up with the global market trends, without compromising on the integrity of the data being provided.
