Spotahome's Innovative Use of Hotjar for User Experience Improvement

Spotahome is an online platform for mid- to long-term rentals, operating in 100 cities across Europe. The company has around 180 employees and its website receives over 50,000 visitors per day. Spotahome's business model is similar to Airbnb, but it focuses on rentals. The company's primary challenge was to understand its users and website visitors better, to ensure the site was running smoothly and to identify opportunities for improvement. The company was not fully utilizing the potential of Hotjar, a behavior analytics tool, to gain insights into user behavior and improve the platform.

Spotahome, an online platform for mid- to long-term rentals, was facing a challenge in understanding their users and website visitors. The Customer Knowledge Manager, Sara Parcero-Leites, was tasked with ensuring the site was running smoothly and identifying opportunities for improvement. However, the team was not utilizing Hotjar, a behavior analytics tool, to its full potential. The tool was only being used superficially, with a few people looking at some recordings and heatmaps, but not conducting a lot of analysis. This lack of deep analysis was a missed opportunity for Spotahome to gain valuable insights about their users' behavior and improve their platform accordingly.

Sara decided to host 'Hotjar parties' to encourage the wider use of the tool within the company. These parties involved inviting everyone in product and engineering to a one-hour call where Sara would prepare and show interesting Hotjar recordings and heatmaps. Attendees would make notes on interesting insights they spotted. The idea was to show the value of Hotjar and how it could help them understand user behavior and identify issues. The parties were a success, with developers and product managers gaining firsthand insights into how users interacted with the features they built. This led to the identification and fixing of numerous bugs. Additionally, Hotjar's new features, such as the relevance score and Highlights, made it easier for Sara to find and organize valuable insights from the vast amount of data.

• The use of Hotjar has led to significant operational improvements at Spotahome. The Hotjar parties have not only increased the company-wide use of the tool but also fostered a culture of collaboration and shared learning. Developers and product managers now have firsthand insights into how users interact with the features they build, leading to more user-centric product development. The use of Hotjar's new features, such as the relevance score and Highlights, has also made it easier to find and organize valuable insights from the vast amount of data. Furthermore, the use of Hotjar surveys has allowed Spotahome to continue gathering valuable user feedback despite budget cuts due to Covid-19. This has led to major improvements, such as fixing the calendar section in the app, which was identified as a problem area through user feedback.

• The company-wide use of Hotjar increased significantly after the introduction of Hotjar parties.

• Numerous bugs were identified and fixed as a result of insights gained from Hotjar recordings.

• The use of Hotjar surveys as a cost-effective alternative to user interviews led to significant cost savings.