Hotspot

A hotspot is a spot on a page that, in a heatmap, carries the greatest concentration of activity — clicks, attention or scrolling.

A hotspot is the readable output of a heatmap: instead of a number, the eye quickly finds where behavior has concentrated. Its value is speed of recognition, but that is also its biggest trap: being hot is in itself neither good nor bad — its meaning depends on context. A hotspot on the main buy button is excellent; the same heat on a non-clickable piece of text is a warning that users expected interaction. The second trap is position bias: the top of the page and the corners are inherently hotter because everyone starts there, so a region's heat must be judged relative to its position, not in absolute terms. And like any heatmap, a hotspot with thin data can be pure noise. A hotspot should be seen as the start of a question, not a conclusion: it says look here, not there is a problem here.