\u00a0<\/span><\/h2>\n Speaker 1<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nThis is the Cherryleaf Podcast.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Speaker 1<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nWhat we do is ask people to introduce themselves, say who they are and what they do. So we will carry on with the tradition and do you want to introduce yourself?<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Speaker 2<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nSure my name is Karissa Van Baulen and I am the Knowledge Base Owner and Customer Education Lead at Hotjar.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Speaker 1<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nSo I can tell for your accent you\u2019re from overseas. Whereabouts are you from?<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Speaker 2<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nI am New Jersey. Originally I moved to Ireland about seven years ago I guess.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nAnd then I’ve stayed in Europe ever since.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Speaker 1<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nYou at the moment in Ireland or you elsewhere?<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Speaker 2<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nNo, right now I’m actually in London. My partner and I are nomadic and so we have been living out of our backpacks before Covid, and so then, after Covid we just got stuck in random Barcelona. Actually, for about four months during the first lockdown and so we’re waiting now so that we get starting travelling again.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Speaker 1<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nRight, a nice lifestyle. There’s lots of people on YouTube doing that at the back of camper vans.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Speaker 2<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nYeah, we’ve considered the camper van thing for a bit. Right now. It’s just two 55 litre bags and a lot of determination to get all my work stuff in there as well.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Speaker 1<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nIt’s me and Hotjar encourages that welcomes that type of way of working?<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Speaker 2<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nYeah, 100% remote company and has been from the beginning. Obviously some people stay in the same place but you have also the option just to kind of move around and see the world really as you work.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Speaker 1<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nI guess a good starting point would be to ask what Hotjar as a company does.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Speaker 2<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nIt kind of takes what Google Analytics shows you, but then visualise it for you and you can see the customers\u2019 needs and actionable bites.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Speaker 2<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nSo we have heat maps recordings and then we have some feedback tools as well, like incoming feedback or surveys so that you can literally ask the user or the customer.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nAs they are on your site, hey, is this working out for you?<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nSo do you hate it? Do you love it? What can we do to improve our site or improve my product?<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Speaker 1<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nI had a chat with a colleague of yours last week, which is where we discovered that you’ve been on one of our training courses and you were using it for the documentation .<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Speaker 2<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nWe use it like you said on a knowledge base and it helps enter knowledge base. We can use those words interchangeably, but heat maps are something that I personally use heavily and it just really helps with like the visualisation of that page in this, like this snippet of time, right?<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nSo it will show you the entire page and then we have three different types of heat maps we have.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nClick move and scroll and each of those kind of give you different insight into where users or clicking you know where they are moving their mouse too, or even if they’re getting to a certain point of your page.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nIt’s incredible. The amount of insight you get, especially for documentation from heat maps.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Speaker 1<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nSo you’re responsible at Hotjar, for what?<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Speaker 2<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nI own the knowledge base I am working with a team of three writers right now and we meet weekly.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nWe discussed with a backlog of things that need to be either written, edited, removed from the knowledge base, and I assign writing assignments, or if it’s not a writing assignment.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nIt’s looking into a section that needs to be improved based on feedback based on support tickets. If people are really confused.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nOr just based on the fact like hey, we haven’t updated this documentation in awhile. Let’s go validate it and make sure that everything is on point when I’m not doing that point then a lot of my role is like the analytics and statistical side of things like how something is performing with her approval rating of documentation in specific sections had to make the flow easier from reading documentation to contact form.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Speaker 1<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nWhat is the purpose of knowledge base and how do the heat maps help you understand whether or not you are achieving?<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nThe purpose that it’s there for.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Speaker 2<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nAbsolutely, I would say there’s a few things that you have knowledge base for help centre for right? You do running a support team, you want to lower the tickets that are coming and so you want to lower the amount of time someone needs to reach out.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nOn the flipside, which is really focus on is self service aspect. If you have a problem with our tool, I want you to be able to look at this documentation.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nRight?<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nAsk your question through the search bar or find the document that’s relevant to you so that you can solve your problem.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Because it makes your experience a million times better. You have a positive overall experience with their tool. You’re not cursing the fact that something’s not working you self served.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nYou know you solved your problem and now you can do a million more things and get the insight that you need to be successful.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nThat’s what we really aim for. Is that you can discover your solution, get it done, and you can keep tracking and you don’t have to wait around for anyone to help if something goes wrong.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Speaker 1<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nSo you used heat maps to see if you’re meeting that objective.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nWhat have things Heat maps help you discover, learn and have fun what you’ve discovered. Learn changed overtime. Or is it being the same things that you’ve learnt? It’s been telling you from when you started using the heat maps to how you use them now.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Speaker 2<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nNo, that’s the best part, honestly.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nIt was kind of life changing.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nGetting that insight, especially for documentation, was like FAQ based because as a writer you are putting in all this time and effort to make sure that your content is speaking to the writer. They’re getting the information they need. There’s no fluff, especially for technical writing. You just don’t want that fluff, because then you use lose interest in like second and people just start drifting off into the one. That example of thinking in particular, we would have a heat map of our FAQ page.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nAnd this epic page would maybe have anywhere between 10 to 15 FAQ topics , which we would list the top. Anchor them down to the questions so when they click on the anchor it brings them straight down to that. <\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nI think you question and what we’ve found by using the heat map is that people who are, I mean not even getting to the 1st 30 or 40% of the page because we’re looking at the scroll heat map and so once people got past the actual like links that we have, they would maybe see two or three FAQs.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nAnd we were shocked because you list all the questions. So in your mind you’re saying, okay, I’m listing, although I think he’s here so someone is going to take the time and read through the list.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nNot only did we have that list, we have the list separated by section or what we thought made sense.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nYeah, yeah, exactly my topics. What we thought made sense, but it made sense to us because we work in the tool. The time we understand the tool, but it wasn’t the organisation that a user would want because they’re thinking in a different way.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nAnd so with that led to is because we saw that only I would say the first three to four questions were being read. We just said, okay, we can still separate it, right? We can still make sure that we have topics organised by topics, but let’s try to get the top three most asked questions in the top, because if they’re only seeing the 1st 34 questions, let’s make sure the important ones are at the top three before and once we did that the questions were seen. <\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nWe had less instances of people reaching out for those particular questions, and people were actually finding the answers they needed rather than kind of giving up after the third or fourth question from scrolling and saying, you know what I mean, I just give up, or maybe I’ll email support and then have to wait for an interaction and go back and forth if something bigger was wrong. It was great just being able to see those top questions being seen by majority of our audience.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Speaker 1<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nSo is that about rearranging the order? Which things were, or was it about taking stuff out, or\u00a0both?<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Speaker 2<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nBoth really, because even evaluate that point. First of all, I personally think that like 10 to 15 if they keep questions or just a lot in general and it’s overwhelming you want to try to make everything not super short, but especially with the kids you just want to get really easy to kind of browse through, get everything that you want done.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nSome of it was just removing stuff where we said you know what? Let’s take this out and play around to see if maybe no one clicks on it with the links on top. Besides the scroll you also have to click heat map so we could see how popular they were clicking given clicked on.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nThere are some links I had no clicks at all. No one had clicked on them and the heat map was about a month old I’d say and there’s just no interaction.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nWe said OK, it’s been a month now once clicked on it, let’s remove it and see what happens. If we have an influx of tickets for that particular question we can always revert removing it. Just kind of removes some of that fluff or some of the junk that just needs to be taken out.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Speaker 1<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nWith the insights that you’re getting today, that may be as a result of doing it for X years or X months.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Speaker 2<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n I needed a manual approach to it and I have a block set up my calendar once a month where at the end of the month I’ll go look at the heat maps of really important pages. <\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nSo I focus on FAQ pages by focus on our landing page and I focus on the contact form because in the contact form we also suggest articles that we think might help in certain situations, and so when I look at those pages I add the results to a spreadsheet because I just like to see all my numbers in one place and I’ll look for things like what’s getting clicked on, especially in the landing page where we have feature articles.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nI’ll see what future articles are actually being visited.<\/span>