Qualtrics Heatmaps
Qualtrics is the world’s leading experience management platform. Heatmaps are an analytics tools to visualize aggregate user behaviors. It is being build as a part of a suite of tools to measure, understand, and improve digital experiences
I led the 0-1 design effort and helped champion the initiative internally. I also onboarded new designers and organized the team to align patterns and milestones
Expanding the capabilities of Digital
Organizing an approach and aligning the design team
Throughout the development of Session Replay, we shared progress with customers and users to get feedback. One of the more common items we heard was that the Replay capabilities are nice, but they need tools that work together. CX customers are often struggling with data silos.
I worked with product, engineering, and research to conceptualize and architect a more ambitious approach. Through many revisions, continuous advocacy, and leadership pitches, I helped secure buy-in and increased staffing.
The Digital app and its pillars
Heatmaps were the most requested capability we heard, but it was one of a handful of common asks. I led a team to design a Digital app that incorporated heatmaps, replays, funnels, simple dashboarding, and path analytics.
Organizing the team around simple foundations
I established basic grids and a high-level layout taxonomy so that the individual designers could focus on their respective areas while making choices based on broad rules. Most of the team focussed on vertical responsibilities; then we collaborated on horizontal functionality.
- Nav and wayfinding — Carve-outs for a new app-specific nav and provisions for titles, page actions, and contextual backward traversal
- Filtering — A new-to-Qualtrics model that facilitates the sharing of context across tools
- Canvas and panels— Primary regions for the tool. The canvas focusses on dense data and visualizations, while panels are used for controls and additional depth
Handling created/saved/transitive states
Heatmaps are sometimes static reports that a user manually configures. I also needed to account for them being generated contextually (and usually only temporarily) by other app tools and reporting surfaces in Qualtrics.
The creation flow was a part of early usability testing. Participants in the study gave positive feedback and successfully completed all the tasks.
Visualization iteration
Design went through a few phases as explorations paralleled internal advocacy and different architecture considerations.
Click maps
This is the primary visualization of the tool. I considered approaches with varying levels of information density. The objectives of the tool shifted through development. Early concepts incorporated more metrics/reporting in the tool to minimize dependencies on the Platform. Those dependencies became less necessary by moving to an App model
Integrated metrics
Platform model, verbose controls
Aggregating pages and users
App model, UXR prototype
The v1 version simplified many early considerations by focusing on light reporting of frustrations, sorting elements by the amount of engagement, and reinforcing the visualization with badges
Scroll maps
This map type is complimentary to the scroll maps. Most of the concepts here considered the correct precision of information. The visualization segments show how many users view a page. I evaluated what increments would be useful, how to visualize them, and if users need finer-tuned controls to adjust the defaults
In platform concept
LT demo
High granularity vis
User controlled landmarks
The visualization ended up leaning towards fewer but clearer landmarks: 20% increments for scroll region overlays and a marker to average page height. Data is broken down further in a list in the panel to supplement the simplicity
