How to Use Hotjar to Find Bugs and UX Issues

Hotjar can help you detect user frustration by identifying bugs and user experience (UX) issues on your site. You can then share these frustration signals and errors with your team to drive improvements in your user's experience.

This article covers:

• Common frustration signals
• Using filters to track down bugs and UX issues
• Using Highlights to group your findings together
• Using Feedback and Surveys to hear directly from your users

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Common frustration signals

UX issues come in a wide variety from problematic pop-ups to a cluttered user interface (UI). Luckily there are some common user frustration signals to look our for that can help you spot these issues.

Common frustration signals on your site that will help you understand your user's pain points are rage clicks, U-turns, and negative user feedback.

Below, we'll share examples of how use Hotjar to explore these signals.

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Using session filters to track down bugs and UX issues

Combining session filters with Recordings is a powerful way to find user frustration that may point 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 rapidly clicked an element during a session, which can be a strong indicator of users having trouble interacting with your site.

For further refinement, sort by the Exit page heading on your playback list.

The Exit page is the last page a user visited before leaving your site. Sorting will group the pages together and let you scan your recordings to identify common exit pages in sessions where a rage click has occurred.

If you start to notice a pattern, this could point to a page where an issue exists. For example, users might be unable to interact as expected on that page and leave your site entirely from that point.

From here, you can watch the recordings to learn more and confirm what you've found so far.

Apply additional filters to gain more detailed insights.

Having already selected the Rage clicked 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.

Use custom events to filter data further

By using Hotjar's Events API to set up Events on your site, you can filter Recordings by specific actions relating to a UX issue or bug.

For example, you could send an event to Hotjar when a user encounters a error on your site and then use the Event session filter to pinpoint exactly what's happening.

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Using Highlights to group your findings together

With Highlights, you can capture and gather findings from your investigation in one place. This helps you identify patterns, validate assumptions, and share your discoveries with your team.

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.

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

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

Heatmaps

1. When viewing a heatmap, click the Highlights icon in the side panel.
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.

View saved highlights

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

Using Feedback and Surveys to hear directly from your users

Empowering your users to share their reactions to your site through submitting  Feedback or completing a Survey can help quickly identify bugs or UX issues.

These 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 vague responses such as "it doesn't work", because you can view the associated recording and pinpoint the issue 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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