How Can I Use Hotjar to Find Bugs or UX Issues?

Use Hotjar to help identify bugs and UX issues on your site, then share them with your team to drive improvements in your user's experience.

This article covers:

• Using filters to track down bugs and UX issues
• Using Highlights to group your findings together
• Using Feedback and Surveys to give your users a voice and view connected recordings

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Using filters to track down bugs and UX issues

Combining filters with Recordings is a powerful way to find user frustration that points to a bug or UX issue. This is particularly relevant after releasing an update, where keeping a close watch on Recordings can help uncover any problems.

From your Recordings page, select Rage clicked from the Segments sidebar.

This will filter your recordings by users who rage clicked during a session. Rage clicks are multiple clicks on the same element during a session. It's defined as five clicks within 500ms of one another and can be a strong indicator of users having issues interacting with your site.

Watching recordings of users that are rage clicking may already reveal an issue on your site.

References: How Do I Filter Session Data, What are Recording Segments, How to Set Up Recordings.

For further refinement, try sorting your recordings by clicking on the Exit page heading on your playback list.

The Exit page is the last page a user visited before leaving your site. Sorting by exit page will result in the exit pages grouping together and let you scan your recordings to identify common exit pages within the Rage clicked segment you've selected.

If you've found a pattern of the same exit page within the Rage click segment, this could point to a page where an issue exists. Users might be unable to interact as expected on that page and be leaving your site entirely from that point. It's worth watching these recordings to learn more and confirm what you've found so far.

References: Recordings Playback List Guide.

Apply additional filters to gain more detailed insights.

Having already selected the Rage click user segment, try adding further filters that relate to user frustration, such as U-Turns, or negative feedback sentiment after setting up a Feedback widget on your site. By diving deeper into user feedback, you'll more quickly find the UX issue or bug that is frustrating your users.

Take your bug and UX issue spotting further by making use of Hotjar's Events API. After you've set up Events on your site and they're being sent to Hotjar, you can filter Recordings by specific events relating to a UX issue or bug. For example, you could send an event to Hotjar when a user encounters an error on your site. Recordings can then be filtered by this event, enabling you to pinpoint exactly what's happening by playing a recording that matches that event filter.

References: How Do I Filter Session Data, How to Set Up Feedback, How to Set Up Events.

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Using Highlights to group your findings together

In the previous section, we saw that filters enable you to isolate user activity that can indicate a potential bug or UX issue requiring investigation. With Highlights, you can capture and gather findings from your investigation in one place. This helps you identify patterns, validate assumptions, and to later share your discoveries with your team.

When you've found an example bug or UX issue from a heatmap or recording, capture a highlight.

Highlights saved from Heatmaps and Recordings can be accessed from your Highlights page.

Heatmaps

1. When viewing a heatmap, click the Show highlights icon.
2. Select the area to be captured and click Save. Add any Labels, Comments, or save it to a collection which is a group of highlights.

Recordings

1. Pause a recording during playback when you're ready to capture a highlight.
2. Click the Save highlight icon. Add any Labels or Comments and adjust the snippet length if needed.
3. Click Save.
4. Add the highlight to a collection.

References: How to Use Highlights.

Save related highlights together in a collection, for easier analysis and sharing.

Collections can be created from your Highlights page or in the process of saving a highlight.

Creating a collection from your Highlights page

1. Visit the Highlights page.
2. Click New collection.
3. Give your collection a name and click Create collection.

Creating a collection while saving a highlight

1. When creating a highlight, click in the Collections field.
2. Click Create collection.
3. Give your collection a name and click Create collection.

References: How to Use Highlights.

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Using Feedback and Surveys to give your users a voice and view connected recordings

Add a more direct way to identify bugs or UX issues by asking your users to leave a Feedback response or complete a Survey. Empowering your users to respond directly to your site in this way can help drive rapid improvements. User responses can also be connected to the session recording that featured the user's feedback or survey response. This removes the guess work around any user responses such as "it doesn't work", because you can view the associated recording and pinpoint what they're referring to.

For further details on setting this up, see our article on How to Connect Feedback and Survey Responses to Recordings.  

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