Reasons to use Clarity from Microsoft

Find out why Microsoft’s Clarity is displacing Hotjar

If you’re involved in user experience work, you’re likely aware of certain tools that can significantly help our daily routine, such as identifying users behavior, validating hypotheses and finding usability limits, especially when we don’t have time (or even a chance) to do interviews with users or a good usability test. I’m talking about online analysis tools, such as the well-known Hotjar.

This kind of tool allows you to record user sessions interaction with the platform (hiding sensitive data, of course), and can provide heat maps and clicks based on patterns found. Besides that, each service offers other interesting features, such as Hotjar’s Feedback, Search and Filter tools.

I have used Hotjar for a long time, both the free and paid version. However the free version has been quite unremarkable for some time now, with fewer and fewer sessions and increasingly limitations. In addition, the paid versions are not so appealing due to its cost, limited number of sessions and the separation of the tool’s features.

Due to all this, we decided to test Clarity, the Microsoft newest tool, which for now promises to be free forever (as Hotjar does, but we know how capitalism works).

At first, Clarity seemed to be a more basic and a less complete tool than Hotjar lacking functionalities. But now, after testing it for a few weeks, I think it has good perks that slightly outweigh Hotjar.

And that’s why I’m here today, to list why you should try Clarity from Microsoft.

Complete Dashboard

As soon as I managed to configure Clarity in the project and wait at least a day of data collection, the first thing that caught my attention was the information from the initial dashboard.

It brings some basic information, such as the number of active users at the moment, the most used browsers and devices and the most popular urls, that is, information that we can see in Google Analytics, so it is not very new.

However, it also brings very interesting usage information, which they call Insights, such as the number of continuous clicks or angry clicks, inactive clicks or dead clicks, excessive scrolling and javascript errors, all linked to screen recordings. Therefore, you can watch the recordings referring to this information. I found this very interesting and very useful to deal with usability and code problems, or even to understand the users behavior.

The record Insights

Watching the recordings is a rather tedious work, but a very necessary one. I believe that with that in mind, Microsoft decided to use AI to generate insights from the recordings. These insights are transcriptions of the recordings, telling what the user did and offering hypotheses about it. This is interesting because during moments of haste, we can utilize these insights to determine whether or not to view a recording, thereby focusing on the recordings that really matter.

No session limits!

No need for long explanations here, right? At the moment, Hotjar (and several other tools) have a session limit and, at least for now, Clarity has no limit at all. He records everything, for real. And still gives you insights of everything. For free. Well, at least for now.

Final considerations

However, it is also worth mentioning some of Clarity’s issues regarding Hotjar. Compared to all features of Hotjar, Clarity has far less. And being able to use Google Analytics together seems interesting, but in my case I ended up not using it. In addition, I found their heatmap much more confusing than Hotjar’s, sometimes the recordings get stuck and it is not always clear in the video where the user clicked on the page since the cursor appears in strange spots. But, as we know, Hotjar has been on the market for years, so I think that they have already experienced these problems and improved from them. And Clarity has just taken its first steps, right?

However, despite these points, I think it’s worth trying Clarity just for all the insights it generates. The fact that you have all this for free and without limits helps a lot too, right? Let’s just hope it stays for free forever or at least gets a more interesting paid version.

That’s it

If you have any questions, suggestions or feedback, leave them in the comments ;)

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