Highlights allows you to capture snippets of your Recordings and Heatmaps, add full recordings, and group them into Collections that you can share and analyze with your team. Grouping these insights together in one place helps your team to identify patterns, validate assumptions, and prioritize brilliantly.
In this article, we’ll look at:
- An overview of Highlights and its use-cases
- How to create a highlight from a Heatmap
- How to create a highlight from a Recording
- How to create and share a Collection
- How to share highlights
- How to resolve highlights
- Highlights replaces favoriting, manual tagging, and filtering by comment in Recordings
- FAQs
An overview of Highlights and its use-cases
- Extract relevant insights by creating a highlight of any part of a heatmap or moment in a recording.
- Use Labels to categorize your highlights:
- 🐞 Bug
- ⚠️ UI/UX Issue
- 😕 Confusion
- 😡 Frustration
- 🎉 Success
- 🏆 Conversion
- Add Comments to highlights about the user behavior you’re seeing and @mention a team member to loop them in on your findings.
- Download your highlights as PNG or MP4 files.
- Share links to highlights with your team members.
- Group highlights into Collections so you have one central place for your most useful insights—and somewhere your team can easily find them!
- Name your Collection by whatever categorization fits your needs; such as User Onboarding or Checkout redesign.
- Sort and filter Collections by Date, Author, Source, or Label so you can quickly find the insights you need.
- Mark highlights as Resolved, when they are no longer relevant, without deleting them. You can then filter by highlights with a status of Resolved or Open.
How to create a highlight from a Heatmap
Create a highlight by clicking directly on an element within your Heatmap
Rather than selecting a custom drawn area within your Heatmap to create a highlight, you can also click directly on an element (such as a CTA button, text area, or navigation bar) and the 'create highlight' prompt will appear. Highlights created in this way will display the '% clicks' on the element in the highlight card after it's saved.
Check out this video that walks you through how to create a custom Heatmap highlight, or follow the steps outlined below.
*Note that the layout/buttons were slightly different when the video above was recorded. See steps below for clarification.
View existing highlights
When viewing a Heatmap, you can click on the Highlights icon in the Overlays section of the right hand side panel to view any highlights that have already been created. This can be toggled on or off.
To create a highlight, click on the area of the Heatmap you're interested in, then click Save to add it to your Highlights page.
From here you can move the highlight to a Collection, choose a Label, or enter a Comment.
Moving your highlight to a Collection and adding a Label allows you to group your highlights. You can also add relevant Comments and @ team members that might find this highlight to be a useful insight.
You and your team members will be able to see this highlight when viewing the same Heatmap in future. When clicking on a Heatmap highlight, you can also:
- Share the highlight with another team member on your Account
- Download a PNG file of the highlight
- Add the highlight to a Collection
- Add additional relevant Labels
- Add additional Comments as necessary
On the navigation sidebar, click the Highlights page icon 
to find your saved highlight.
How to create a highlight from a Recording
You can create a highlight from either a snippet of a recording or the entire recording itself and add it to a collection.
Check out this video which walks you through creating a recording highlight, or follow the steps outlined below.
Pause the recording on the part you’re interested in and the Highlights menu will appear.
Adjust the snippet length to the desired length.
By default, we’ll take a 30-second snippet of that part of the Recording as the highlight, which can be adjusted before you click Save either in the Start and End fields, or with the sliders on the timeline.
Add any further comments and labels, then choose the collection where the highlight will be stored. If you already have collections created, add the highlight to an existing one. If not, you can create a new collection. You can also add additional comments here, mention team mates and add labels to categorize the highlight.
Your highlight will be saved and you can find it in the Highlights tab.
How to create and share a Collection
If you have created a highlight from a heatmap or recording as outlined above, these will be available in the Highlights section. From here, you can create new Collections, assign highlights to existing Collections, and share Collections with your team.
Navigate to the Highlights page.
Under Collections select Create new collection.
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Add a name and click Create collection.
Click on the share icon to generate a URL that can be shared with other Hotjar users.
How to share highlights
Highlights can easily be shared with colleagues or they can be included in presentations to build use-cases for feature changes, product updates or design changes.
How to share a highlight with your team
Click the share icon at the top of a heatmap or recording highlight.
Share the highlight.
Copy the link and share it with any team member that has access to your Hotjar Organization.
How to download a highlight
Click the download icon at the top of a heatmap or recording highlight.
Share the highlight.
Your Heatmap highlights are saved as PNG files and your recording highlights are saved as MP4 files. You can use these highlights in presentations or share them with people who don't have access to your Hotjar Organization.
How to resolve highlights
When a highlight is no longer relevant, you can mark it as resolved. When you resolve a highlight, a status of 'Resolved' is applied to it, but the highlight is not deleted.
To mark a highlight as resolved, click the vertical ellipsis icon while viewing a highlight and select Mark as resolved. To undo this action, follow the same step but select Mark as open.
Use the Status filter to display all highlights, or only those that have a status of 'Resolved' or 'Open'
Highlights replaces favoriting, manual tagging, and filtering by comment in Recordings
- Favoriting: Instead of favoriting Recordings that are important to you, now you can save snippets of Recordings as highlights. All highlights are saved in one central place, making them easier to find by you and the team.
- Manually adding tags: Instead of manually adding tags to your Recordings, now you can add a Label to the Recording highlight. You can still automatically apply tags using the Events API.
- Filtering by comment: Instead of filtering by comments in Recordings, now you can filter by Recordings highlights.
If you’d like to save the Recordings you’ve favorited or manually tagged, you’ll have to export your list of Recordings before November 8.
Here's a video that walks through how you can use highlights in place of favorites and manual tags:
How many highlights can be collected?
You can collect an unlimited number of highlights.
Will Highlights in any way impact my plan limits, such as session limits?
Highlights will not in any way impact your plan limit or session limits.
Can highlights be shared?
Heatmap and recordings highlights can be shared with team members that have access to your Hotjar Organization. You can also download highlights as PNG and MP4 files.
Why can't I delete a highlight?
A highlight can only be deleted by the user who originally created it. If you did not create a highlight, you won't see an option to delete it. However, if the underlying data from a highlight is deleted, the highlight itself will also be deleted. For example, if you delete a recording, then any highlights taken from that recording would also be deleted.
How long can a highlight be?
A highlight can be up to 10 minutes long.