One of my favourite consultancy memories is sitting with a client’s community team in the organisation’s huge internal theatre watching hundreds of recordings of members using the community.
We even made popcorn!
It’s one thing to look at community data to try and fathom what members are doing in your community. It’s another to install Hotjar and watch hundreds of recordings of members using the site.
After spending a few hours watching the recordings, we had identified three specific use cases of the community and identified learnings we would never have identified from looking at the aggregate data.
We noticed members clicked on a lot of external links shared in the community. They were using the community to identify trusted sources of information and related products. We needed to build this into the site itself and within the member journey flow.
We noticed members were copying specific lines of code and seemed to be copying and pasting diagrams/videos into another tool. Again, something we could incorporate into the product support itself and build specific areas of the community for it.
We noticed pretty much no one used the homepage to navigate the community. But they did use related discussions a lot.
If you’re not using Hotjar (or a competitor yet), I strongly recommend you do.
