Carlos de Miguel Pamplona

Heatmaps is Hotjar's flagship and the main reason users choose the product. In 2022, Manual Heatmaps were phased out in favour of Continuous Heatmaps — auto-gathered, analysis-ready data you reach just by searching a page URL, with no manual setup.

After the phase-out, weekly active users, return rate and engagement all dropped — more steeply than for other Hotjar tools — and the happiness score declined. The week-1 experience was suboptimal and users perceived Heatmaps as a static snapshot rather than a continuous-insight tool, hurting new monthly active user acquisition.

• Owned the design strategy and product vision, partnering closely with PM and Team Lead.
• Ran market research, in-depth user interviews and usability testing (scripts, facilitation, synthesis, stakeholder readouts).
• Planned and facilitated ideation workshops with support, sales and customer education teams.
• Partnered with Brand and the Design System team; contributed to GTM/marketing docs and the business case.
• Defined the design end-to-end, from wireframes to final interactions.

Benchmarking showed how to deliver contextual information and flexibility despite tight UI space. The answer: a new, scalable layout plus a Smart Panel built on four principles — simplicity, contextuality, connectivity and flexibility. It improved discoverability and learnability of core heatmap features and created room to experiment toward a sticky use case. Delivering it required defining a new global layout and grid with the Design System team.

Heatmaps is Hotjar's flagship. After 2021 data-storage changes hurt the experience and limited innovation, "The Next Generation of Heatmaps" reopened a path to lead the mid-market. This project pushed Heatmaps to the next level — making behavior-pattern analysis effortless.

Heatmaps had to grow again — but we couldn't keep optimising the same way. We needed innovative design that made analysing behavior patterns effortless and aligned with company vision, which meant doing deep research first.

• Owned the design strategy and product vision, partnering closely with PM and Team Lead.
• Ran market research, in-depth user interviews and usability testing (scripts, facilitation, synthesis, stakeholder readouts).
• Planned and facilitated ideation workshops with support, sales and customer education teams.
• Partnered with Brand and the Design System team; contributed to GTM/marketing docs and the business case.
• Defined the design end-to-end, from wireframes to final interactions.

I built a design strategy aligned to group and company goals — "The Pursuit of a Superior Heatmap" — grounded in two inputs: (A) marketplace analysis to find where we could stand out in the mid-market, and (B) user research to identify the building blocks that matter most to users who analyse pages regularly.

Research surfaced three core user needs:

• Understand in-page journeys — how users navigate before acting.
• See what's most critical — surface the most engaging content with confidence.
• Find where users get stuck — discover issues and prioritise fixes.

We started with need #2 — Engagement Zones — for its impact, feasibility and user benefit: users switch between map types looking for a complete picture, multi-map users retain better, interviews flagged engagement as a top need, competitors (Contentsquare, Mouseflow) already offered it, and churn/support signals all pointed to it.

In our "Discovery Reviews", the squad co-created — on Miro — a feasible formula to surface engagement without months of complex build. Strong async collaboration on Slack across Backend, Design and Frontend landed the final formula. We then explored the UI, validated the concept with users, and named the feature in a workshop with squad, marketing and support.

Engagement Zones merges available interaction data — clicks, move and scroll on desktop; taps and scroll on mobile and tablet — and overlays a grid that highlights the most engaging parts of the page. Analyse pages in seconds, get a well-rounded view of engagement, and share insights confidently. Toggle it on/off from the right-hand panel — available on all Observe Business and Scale plans.

With WAU targets met and Heatmaps back on a positive trend, we can push toward innovation and re-establish Heatmaps as a mid-market leader. We're now (May 2023) tackling the two remaining opportunities: in-page journeys and finding where users get stuck.