Using Hotjar Survey in Mobile App

Photo by UX Indonesia on Unsplash

Getting user feedback is one of the crucial parts of product management. Asking them some questions about new features or existing ones may show you the way you should walkthrough.

I am not going to tell you the different ways to do that one by one. Because there are many articles about it already. I will tell our story of how we solve this case in apps of arabam.com

As a product team, we would like to make surveys in apps. Indeed the idea has born was about a feature that is the only available in our apps. As we discussed further we thought that would be great showing a survey on any screens we want any time. Why not? We control it:)

Ok, we are using Hotjar for that matter on the web side. Why don’t we use it for the app side as well? Good question:) Because our sweet, irrevocable, and very useful tool Hotjar has no SDK for apps.

So, we have started to investigate such a tool that helps us to do in our apps. As you can guess there are many different tools for it (you can also find them on the internet with a quick search)

But:)

We think they are expensive. Yes maybe comprehensive but still expensive. We need a fast, simple, and no extra budget solution (little software cost doesn’t count).

Means; turn back to the Hotjar:) Is there any way to use Hotjar in the app?

The answer is yes thanks to the external link you may see below;

Choose the external link on the location step when you create a survey

Hotjar provides an external link for your survey, so you can use this link off-site. Then we got together with lead developers to discuss the idea of using this link in our apps. My main concern was about the experience of app users as a PM. I don’t want users to exit the app in order to fill the survey. Also don’t want to bother them at all. We’ve designed sweet, a little popup in order to make this experience smooth.

Then our IOS developer fellow showed us POC which relieved me enough:) it was working well!

But for the Android side; We realized that hotjar is not seen in the default android webview! Yes, completely empty state:) With a little research, see that we may overcome this situation by using the chrome custom tabs feature which is a framework for android devices.

Roughly, technical steps were like:

1. No need to create an admin panel for managing surveys (in which screens, what popup says, entering external link of a survey, etc.) in the first place. We decided to do it manually from BE. Because; this is just MVP
2. As a product team, we determined 7 screens that might be used for showing surveys.
3. BE defined those 7 screens to the database as possible survey screens
4. Apps developed popup structure for these screens and tied them to config
5. BE sends popup title, text, an external survey link, button
6. Apps set controls over steps; Is there an active survey for this screen? Has survey seen by user? (If yes survey ıd would add to read list not to show it again) etc.

I am not going to go into further detail, not to bore you. Here is how it works;

Development of this feature took just one sprint (two weeks) and I think it is very fast, low cost and effective solution to show surveys in your app. An appearing pop-up at the bottom of the screen that calls user to attend survey and webview screens are seen as very acceptable.

Now it is time to analyze the output of the survey from Hotjar dashboard!