This article will talk about one of these hotspots and how they're the most impactful aspects of your web page and the user experience you provide. We'll be uncovering questions like:
- What are they?
- What are some great examples?
- How do I create them?
Let's get to know them now.
What are Hotspots?
In English, the word 'Hotspot' means a certain area of attraction, a 'hot spot' that interests people and gets their attention.
Similarly, hotspots, in a UX/UI pattern sense, are the attention-grabbing spots that gather the user's attention on your website to a particular area.
UX/UI Hotspots are extremely useful tools that are great for customer navigation and can change the way your webpage operates for the better by drawing a great amount of user attention right where you wish it to be.
Their main aim is to provide effortless access to useful information about any aspect of your product. They're static, they're a part of your onboarding contents as well as design decisions and elements, and they're often invisible but become apparent when the visitor hovers their mouse over one of them. And finally, they become responsive when the visitor clicks on them.
They're one of the easiest ways to offer a clickable and informative guide for your page's key features and must-see elements. What's even better about them is that they don't cause distraction or block any part of your UI, so it's safe to say that they don't interrupt a user who's already in the middle of an experience.
Having said that, let's now move on to some of the examples I've gathered to have a better understanding of the subject.
4 Examples of Great Hotspots
Increasing Online Course Engagement
Before going too much into the product-related examples, I'd like to talk about a different aspect and an advantaged area of hotspot visualisation. In today's world, where everything is slowly but progressively becoming digital, school-related matters are no different. And creating an environment that focuses on student involvement in a digital aspect is harder than ever.
With the help of these smart spots, educators, video hosts, bosses, you name the subject, can encourage users/students to reveal and access the hidden information inside a text, an image, a photograph, discovering its value and key elements.
Or even further, they can be combined with some design tools like the ''drag and drop'' function and can be used to implement design elements into an imagery test in which the students are expected to insert the right elements, like words, phrases, or images.
Summing up, their primary function in eLearning is to make the learning process more fun, involving, and engaging, letting students discover and test their practical knowledge in an innovative and instructive way.
Product Presentation
One of the most common uses of UX hotspots is concerned with product presentation. In today's competitive market, e-commerce practices require appealing and highly attention-grabbing product demonstrations. And what's the answer? Yes, hotspots, again.
An average hotspot for product presentation is a great value indicator that displays the quality of your product in an engaging and involving way that appeals to the users from the beginning of their journey with you. By implementing these hotspots to your product images or gifs, you can avoid the distraction factors that arise from too many wordy information texts in the middle of the screen and gather all the key information in one or two spots instead.
Thanks to these interactive elements, you can boost your user engagement and website traffic by enabling and enhancing your webpage's exploration and design process.
Less Page Space and Product Cards
I've mentioned that hotspots work great in e-commerce, especially in product feature showcases. But what if I have told you that you can use hotspots serving as links to represent product bundles? Sounds convenient, I know.
Here's how.
There are a number of ways to organize your hotspot bundling; you can display a combination of certain products and tell your audience to ''shop the whole look.'' If you go with this one, you just need to create one single hotspot that involves all the information regarding each product shown in the image. You can also have your users click on one product and receive further suggestions via these hotspots about related products - like ''people also buy'' sections.
Or if you have numerous products that vary in size, color, length, shape, etc., you can also use hotspots to depict one single product or a type of product categorized into some key features.
In this sense, hotspot product bundles take up much less space on your webpage. Also, they make it easier for you to focus your whole page on a specific set of products categorized by theme or other features such as special holidays, events, dates, etc.
Explaining Infographics
Regardless of your work field or business area, you must at least have benefited from the use of various charts and infographics to visualize your points, enrich your slides, and more. If you have, you already know that infographics are great for explaining complicated things with the help of visualization and demonstration of shapes, figures, and facts.
And with hotspots, you can create interactive and more understandable infographic content with a great level of visuality and engagement. You can avoid inserting large texts in tiny spaces on your webpage, and gather the key points in the relevant areas instead. Your visitors will be able to see the main areas of focus, and easily connect the visual infographic with the given information, thus understanding it.
This kind of approach is useful for the overall design of your web app and the elimination of distraction elements within the visiting process done by the users. It's a win-win for everybody.
3 Ways to Create a Hotspot
1- In House Development
In-House Development is the first option you can go with. At its core, it means employing designers, developers, any kind of experts without getting any kind of external help. There's just you, hand-picking each member of your team in person and giving them the tasks you want them to complete.
How is this relevant?
In-house development allows you full control, puts you in charge, and lets you communicate directly. With its help, you have the chance to build a team that consists of loyal, devoted people that you can rely on, because you picked them in the first place, remember?
How?
2- Low-code
3- No code
The third option you can go with is the 'no-code' version. As the name suggests, this option requires no coding -at all- for the creation of hotspots.
How, where, and when?
You can start today with the brilliant tools on useronboarding.academy that allow you to create and/or transform the use of hotspots with the blink of an eye and with great ease.
You can build interactive product guides and insert the hotspots in these, or you can learn new and different ways to benefit from hotspots, just like the examples given above. You can explore the numerous tools the website offers and expose yourself to new and valuable information and ways to step up your interactive web page design and your overall user onboarding flow.
