Free Web UX Tool Offers Visual Heatmaps, Session Playbacks & More

Microsoft has announced the launch of a free-to-use behavioural analytics tool called Microsoft Clarity.

Clarity, as the name suggests, is designed to help users go down the rabbit hole and see precisely what users are doing on their site, which can lead to more informed decision making about design, content and strategy.

Crucially, Microsoft says Clarity will be GDPR compliant, so there’ll be no worries about misuse of user data while you’re browsing behaviour patterns.

In a remarkable show of Christmas cheer, Microsoft has announced that Clarity will be free to all users – no matter your traffic. That means massive brands, as well as small start-ups, now have access to this premium-level software for absolutely nothing.

Although Clarity requires you to put some code in your site, the boffins at Microsoft say there’ll be no impact on load time either, and no risk of turning customers away because your page is taking too long to load.

Clarity’s Three Features

Clarity has three main features:

Session playbacks. This feature lets web owners replay site visits.

Playbacks allow you to see where a user clicked, what they scrolled past, what they paused at and how they interacted with your site in real-time.

You might have a generic idea of what users are doing and where they’re going, but session playbacks will be able to turn those hunches into concrete information.

Microsoft Blog

“The filtering mechanism you can use to slice recordings allows you to get extremely granular about which recordings to select. We’ve also used machine learning to discover novel patterns in session recordings like “rage clicks,” “dead clicks,” and “excessive scrolling,” and you can use these classifications to filter your sessions as well.”

Heatmaps. Get visual with heatmaps and discover how users interact with your website via clickmaps and scrollmaps.

These views show you a large amount of data in an easily digestible way and provide actionable reports.

“Clickmaps tell you what content on your page is important to your users, while scrollmaps show whether your users are seeing what’s important.”

Insights dashboard. This dashboard shows an aggregate view of metrics that will help marketers get a broader and more in-depth understanding of site traffic flow.

“The statistics we provide can be sliced using several of the session filters we provide for recordings, which allow you to drill down on specific patterns of user behaviour that can provide the basis for making good decisions about modifying your site.”

Turn Data Into Action Points

Tools like this are invaluable to brands and marketers looking to improve website UX and increase productivity within their digital marketing team.

You’ll be able to weed out non-responsive sections of the site thanks to Clarity’s ability to spot things like ‘rage clicks’. Rage clicks are defined as areas of the site that are clicked multiple times in quick succession – which can indicate somewhere users think should be clicked, but can’t be.

The dashboard will provide an overall understanding of traffic patterns and behaviours on-site, which will enable marketers to make website UX decisions and come up with new digital marketing strategies that are driven by insight, data and actionable learnings.

Heatmaps will be able to help you identify what users find important. At the same time, scrollmaps will be useful because it’ll let you see if users are discovering important sections of a website.

“The aggregate nature of heatmaps help you qualify user behaviours and trends, and they make it easy to communicate impact to stakeholders and provide data-driven justifications for design decisions.”

By being able to see which areas of the site are turning users off and which are performing well can enable you to make decisions that lead to conversion, an increase in revenue and better performance.

How Do You Set Up Microsoft Clarity?

Setting up Microsoft Clarity is really easy, all you have to do is:

1. Head to https://clarity.microsoft.com/.
2. Create a project
3. Add the Javascript to your site

Enterprise-grade UX tools and clarity, as easy as 1,2,3.