Mouse Heatmaps: 8 Ways They Can Improve Your Product
See What Users Actually Do, Not Just What They Say: Surveys and analytics only tell part of the story. Mouse heatmaps reveal where users hesitate, struggle, or engage the most—helping you make data-driven decisions with confidence.
Prioritize Fixes and Features That Actually Matter: Instead of guessing what to work on next, heatmaps highlight where users spend time (or get frustrated), giving you clear direction on what needs attention first.
Find Out Why Users Drop Off—And Fix It: Not all drop-offs are created equal. Heatmaps show if users are missing key CTAs, struggling with form fields, or getting confused—so you can remove obstacles before they churn.
Pinpoint Hidden Friction in Your Activation Funnel: Are users clicking where they shouldn’t? Getting stuck on key steps? Heatmaps expose bottlenecks so you can smooth out the journey and boost conversions.
Probably the most interesting and rewarding part of the job of a product manager is learning about the way their users think and act when it comes to using their products.
To do this, we will usually conduct user interviews, run surveys, and analyze our data. There is, however, another valuable tool in the arsenal of a PM that can help you empathize with your users - mouse heatmaps!
Today, I want us to go over the practical use cases of mouse heatmaps and effective use cases for improving your product.
What Are Mouse Heatmaps And How Do They Work?
A mouse heatmap (a.k.a. Attention heatmap) is a product analytics tool tool that visualizes how users interact with your interface using their mouse movements. It creates a visual overlay—typically using color gradients—on a screenshot of your UI to show where users hover, move, and click most frequently.
This can help you identify which elements are drawing attention, where users may be hesitating, or what’s being completely ignored. Mouse heatmaps are especially useful when used alongside other heatmap types, like scroll heatmaps, which capture how far down the page users are scrolling.
Used together, these tools give you a fuller picture of user engagement—what they see, what they skip, and where their attention naturally flows.
Different types of heatmaps are commonly used by product managers and UX designers to get insights into the behavior of their users, including scroll maps, click maps, user attention maps, eye-tracking heatmaps, and many more heatmap examples. Each type can lend specific insights for you to fire up user retention and engagement, however today I want us to do a deep dive into one particular type - the mouse heatmap.
A mouse heatmap is what you would call an “aggregate” as it includes combined data from several distinct types of user interactions - click behavior, scroll behavior, and mouse movement behavior.
Mouse heatmaps are relatively new in the world of visual product analytics because combining the data from these three different types of behaviors into a single visual is a hard task to accomplish and it was the advent of AI models that allowed analytics tools to do it.
Real-Life Use Cases of Optimizing Your Product With Mouse Tracking
With a general understanding of what these heatmaps are behind us, let’s dive into several real-life use cases when you can do something valuable for your product by looking at and analyzing your mouse heatmaps.
How Product Managers Use Mouse Heatmaps
Although analyzing user interactions might seem like something that fits the needs of UX designers more, product managers can use mouse heatmaps to solve their own set of problems too. Here are some of the ways I have used this tool to improve my products.
#1: Finding Chokepoints In Your Activation Funnel
From my experience tackling activation challenges, funnel optimization is one of the most complex yet high-impact responsibilities of a product manager. Even a modest 10% lift in activation can create a cascading effect throughout the funnel, significantly increasing Free → Paid conversion.
However, activation isn’t just a numbers game—it’s a puzzle that requires deep behavioral insights, iterative experimentation, and a willingness to question assumptions about how users engage with your product. The key isn't just to nudge more users through the funnel but to truly understand why they drop off in the first place.aid conversion.
To do this, a product manager will use practically all of the tools in their arsenal, including analytics, surveys, etc. Mouse maps are among these tools too. Here’s one of the many ways these could help improve activation.
Imagine you work at Atlassian and you have taken a quarterly goal of improving the setup rate of Jira Cloud.
By looking at the activation funnel using your analytics tool, you see that there is a serious drop at the step when users type their Jira instance name and create their Atlassian website.
To understand what has happened, you might open your heatmap tool and look at the mouse heatmap. What you see is users spending a lot of time on the page, actively clicking on the site name field and the “Get Started In Jira” field.
This is not a normal behavior, as you want people to click on each field only once and spend no more than 10-15 seconds on this page. You launch an investigation and ask your QA team to check what’s going on.
What your team finds is that, for a certain group of users, the site name validator (that checks if the name already exists) throws an error no matter what you type.
The reason is that an invisible Google Recaptcha thinks these users are bots. So, to fix this, you talk to your security team, understand that the security threshold for recaptcha is higher than what we need, and lower it.
As a result, you are unlocking your users, letting them create their site, and significantly improving your activation rate.
#2: Helping With Feature Prioritization
When it comes to feature prioritization, the single strongest factor you consider is the impact of that feature on your users. You measure this impact based on data, your knowledge of the user needs (based on surveys and interviews), your gut feeling, and how users interact with your interface.
The latter is where your mouse heatmaps come to help.
Returning back to our Jira example. Let’s assume that you want to improve the way people organize the backlog and there are more than 20 feature ideas for it. To prioritize them based on user needs, you review the heatmap of the backlog page. After review, you see that there is a lot of activity in the quick filters section.
So, you go to your analytics tool and extract a distribution chart of quick filters that your users have applied most frequently. By looking at this data, you see that around 50% of all Jira users create a quick filter that shows the tasks with “To Do Status”.
A great way to improve your users’ experience in this case would be to add a dedicated filter button for statuses. Let's say this feature idea was already on your list of improvements, so you use this insight to lend it a higher priority and move it to the top of your team’s backlog.
#3: Conversion Rate Optimization
In terms of complexity, conversion rate (CR) optimization can easily compete with activation funnels. I have spent months analyzing the CR and similar metrics for my products, adding features for improving it, realizing that they don’t work, adding something else, and repeating this cycle until I build something that actually increases the conversion rate.
Just like with activation, mouse heatmaps are an effective tool for analyzing conversion challenges for your products.
In most cases, the main benefit of this tool is identifying the cases when people click on the wrong CTAs and ignore the ones that lead to conversion. Let me demonstrate it on the product page of a commercial kitchen equipment store.
Imagine that we review the website heatmap of this web page. Most likely, we will see that a certain number of people click on the “Chat Now” button above the main call to action (view product). I understand, the company has added it to convince their users that their products are the cheapest in the market.
However, the problem here is that clicking on “Chat Now” breaks the journey of the users reviewing the product and buying it - significantly decreasing the conversion rate.
My suggestion here would be to move this message and CTA to a less prominent part of the page in order to avoid breaking users’ journeys.
#5: A/B Testing To Validate Features
Another useful application of mouse heatmaps is feature validation via A/B testing. Here, heatmaps can serve as a valuable source of data in terms of visually showing you the improvements (or lack thereof) in the way users interact with your feature.
What you do in this case is run the A/B test with your feature turned on for one variant A and off for variant B. You then make sure that your heatmapping tool is tracking user interactions on both variants to let you do a side-by-side comparison of the mouse heatmap of each.
By looking at them, you can easily spot the changes in user behavior and see if your new feature had the impact you were hoping for.
An example of this would be adding a “Download All” button on the file browser page of your cloud storage product. If people start actively interacting with that button instead of manually downloading every single file in their storage, then your new feature will be a success.
How UX Designers Use Mouse Heatmaps
Heatmaps are a fantastic tool for examining user interactions. Thus, I consider it to be one of the must-haves in the arsenal of UX designers. Here are some of the ways my UX team has used mouse heatmaps to improve their design.
#6: Improving Form Completion Rate
No matter what kind of product you have, you will most likely have at least one form in your activation or monetization funnel. Moreover, based on my experience, you will most likely lose people/conversions on the funnel step where they fill in this form.
The main reason you lose them is likely a poor user experience leaving them bored or frustrated. To understand whether this is happening to your form and fix this, product designers will perform usability tests and closely watch the behavior of their users. The problem with these tests, however, is that they are both time and resource-consuming.
Mouse heatmap form analytics, however, can identify a significant portion of usability problems at a fraction of the cost.
For instance, if you see a large drop on your registration form on checkout and look at the heatmap, you might find out that there is significant mouse activity in the first couple of fields, and then the activity suddenly drops on the “phone number” field.
This might indicate that people are not comfortable with sharing their phone numbers with you and you should consider an alternative way of identifying them.
#7: Fixing Navigation Issues
Sometimes the drop in discovery and usage of your features or website sections will be due to your users not being able to find them on your platform.
If you are an eCommerce store that just started selling professional athletic shoes (e.g. wrestling, basketball, etc.), you would naturally add a new section under your existing navigation and call it a day.
However, imagine that your athletic shoe section traffic is much lower than what you expected. After reviewing the mouse heatmap, you might see that very few people hover over that athletic section in your navigation.
On one hand, this might be due to a lack of interest in athletic shoes. On the other hand, people might not have noticed you adding it just because the list of shoe types you have in your navigation is quite extensive.
While it does make a lot of sense to keep your sections organized, if you add something new, you should place it somewhere prominent (at least in the beginning). So, a UX designer might consider placing this new section right on the top navigation bar. Alternatively, they might keep it at the same spot but add a “new” tag on it to draw more eyes.
#8: Enhancing Readability
This case is especially relevant for blogs or other resources with long-form content. Sometimes the way you have designed your text will negatively affect its readability - resulting in users abandoning the article.
Just like with previous use cases, this is something you can diagnose with mouse heatmaps. For instance, if you look at the heatmap and see people hovering their cursors over each line of your text, then the text section might be too wide for them to track each line with their eyes (so, they end up using their mouse cursor for that purpose instead).
Heatmap Software for You to Consider
With the practical use cases of mouse heatmaps covered, let me also talk a little bit about the different heatmap analytics products that offer this tool and show you the differences in the way they approach it.
Hotjar
Hotjar does not have a mouse heatmap per se. Instead, it has divided the information that you can find in a typical mouse heatmap into distinct types of maps. Namely, you have mouse click maps, scroll maps, mouse movement heatmaps, and rage click heatmaps. Here’s what its move map looks like.
While having separate maps seems inconvenient at first glance, they are much better at providing you with more granular data for each type of interaction (e.g. scroll).
Moreover, it also comes with additional functionalities, such as real-time website visitor count, session replays, visual representation of engagement zonen on page layout, etc.
Crazy Egg
With Crazy Egg, you are getting a heatmap that includes data sets both from user clicks and mouse hover. With their proprietary algorithms, they can combine these two distinct types of interactions into a single map that shows the general areas of interest for your users.
Compared to Hotjar, you get slightly less granularity. However, this type of combined heatmap is quite useful when your goal is to get an overview of how people interact with your UX instead of identifying the exact locations of clicks, scroll depth, etc.
Just like Hotjar, you also get session recordings and other analytics capabilities with Crazy Egg.
Mouseflow
Just like Hotjar, Mouseflow will provide you with 6 distinct types of mouse tracking heatmaps instead of a single combined one. You get the usual types, including click, hover, and scroll heatmaps.
Apart from that, however, Mouseflow also comes with a special type of heatmap that you can rarely find in such platforms - geographical heatmap.
Instead of visualizing user interaction on your UX, this heatmap will show you the world map and highlight the parts of the world where you get the most users (and interactions).
A Must-Add to User Interviews and Usability Testing
I argue that user interviews are the single most valuable activity that product managers do. But, just like usability testing, it’s quite time-consuming.
So, consider using mouse heatmaps as a fantastic (and cheap) alternative for getting answers to some of the easier questions you have about your customers and using your precious interview bandwidth for the harder ones instead.
Looking for more ways to improve your products? Brush up your knowledge and skill set in this fascinating profession of ours by subscribing to our newsletter. You'll stay up-to-date on the latest product management topics with our top-tier educational content and software lists.
