Hotjar Cinema

I came up with a simple and engaging team activity for cultivating empathy with our users. The concept revolves around watching hand-picked user session recordings together in a cinema-like setting. All the team members have to do is to kick back and enjoy the show.

Driving a truly user-centered process requires everyone on the team to get a shared sense of the users’ experience. Hotjar is a terrific tool for observing and assessing the users’ experience with your website as is experienced in production. However, expecting non-designers to dedicate time sitting through vast amounts of user session recordings is by all means unreasonable.

So during my time as a member of the New Sales Universe squad of the YouSee Digital Tribe I set out to invent a format for showing a hand picked selection of user session recordings to the team in a fun and engaging way – and that’s how Hotjar Cinema came about.

Hotjar Cinema Cover — Title card for the Hotjar Cinema video presentation

The concept is fairly simple; the lights are dimmed to set the mood as the team gathers around a big screen in their squad room. All they have to do the next half hour is to kick back, eat popcorn and enjoy the show. Empathy and curiosity along with discussions and ideas follow naturally as everyone is simultaneously experiencing the users interact (and often struggle) with their product.

A social team event

Besides giving the team members a better idea of how the users are interacting with the interface we’re building or them, it also turned out to be a fun social event bringing the team members closer together and providing a much needed break in a fast-paced agile environment.

The team gathers around a screen in their squad room for a session of Hotjar Cinema with popcorn and sodas

Watch an episode

The video presentation format was created in Keynote and carefully crafted to imitate the feeling of being in the cinema to make sure everyone was engaged and paying attention to the recordings on the screen. During playback the Hotjar links were manually pressed and accompanied by a short introduction. The end credits were added (and changed from session to session) in order to give the team members a heightened sense of ownership of the user experience.

Here’s an example of an actual Hotjar Cinema session as it was played for the group. Kick back and enjoy the show: