In the ever-changing world of digital engagement, understanding user behaviour is crucial for any business that wants to better understand what visitors and employees need.
Where Google Analytics, Hotjar and, particularly in the area of intranets, Matomo have long provided important information about user behaviour, Microsoft offers a comprehensive alternative with Clarity – and it’s even free and open source.
This article discusses Microsoft Clarity and its functions and benefits.
We show how it can help companies decode user interactions, identify pain points and ultimately improve the user experience.
What is Microsoft Clarity?
Clarity is a user behaviour analysis tool that helps editors understand how users interact with your website or intranet. It provides information about where users click, how far they scroll and which elements they interact with the most.
This helps the editorial team to identify weak points and optimise the user experience through targeted adjustments.
Essentially, Microsoft Clarity helps you make data-driven decisions to optimise your online presence and provide your employees with a better experience on the intranet.
What advantages does Microsoft Clarity offer
Where decision-makers rely on summarised reports and dashboards to analyse data for well-founded decisions, website and intranet administrators as well as the responsible editorial team need insights into user behaviour. This is where Clarity comes into play.
Microsoft Clarity is open source and can therefore be used free of charge without restriction. It can be integrated into an unlimited number of websites or SharePoint intranets. Each Clarity project can be shared with any number of users in order to analyse the behaviour together.
- Open source and free of charge
- GDPR-compliant
- Seamless integration
- Complete data records (no samples)
What core functions does Microsoft Clarity offer?
Clarity’s focus is on analysing and evaluating users and providing insights in accessible and easy-to-understand formats. These visualisations include
Heatmaps
One of the main functions of Clarity is the generation of heat maps. These provide a visual representation of interactions on a website through user clicks, movements and scrolling. This shows the areas of the page that attract the most attention.
- Click heatmaps: Shows elements with the highest interaction.
- Scroll heatmaps: Reveals how far visitors have scrolled on your pages.
- Area heatmaps: Allows you to see the total number of clicks in a particular area/element.
(Source: Microsoft – clarity.microsoft.com)
Heatmaps are crucial for optimising the placement of content, call-to-action buttons and other elements.
A practical additional function is the comparison view. Different versions of the same page can be compared with each other here. This allows adjustments to the user experience to be checked for effectiveness.
Session recordings
Session recordings are a special feature of Microsoft Clarity. These allow the editorial team to relive user interaction in recorded sessions. The movement through one or more pages can be traced exactly.
These insights make it possible to identify difficulties in usability, optimisation opportunities and bugs.
Insight dashboard
The insight dashboard is the central view in Microsoft Clarity. This is where all the information collected is summarised and presented visually. In addition to general information such as the number of clicks on individual subpages, Clarity also displays unusual user behaviour such as excessive clicking or rapid page abandonment. Bugs and dead links are also recorded.
You can also see which pages are performing better than others. Just because a user is on the website does not necessarily mean that they are active. This function allows you to differentiate between active and passive interaction.
Why should you use Microsoft Clarity in your SharePoint intranet?
Organisations and companies strive for efficiency and engagement in their intranets. Content must be clearly visible and easy to understand so that the best possible user experience can be guaranteed.
It is therefore essential to make data-driven decisions in order to develop and improve the user experience. Microsoft Clarity creates this data basis by analysing user behaviour, as already discussed.
(Source: Microsoft – clarity.microsoft.com)
Insights into user behaviour
By analysing user behaviour with Clarity, you can make statements about how users interact with the content of your intranet, which content is seen and which hardly gets any attention.
Identification of pain points and optimisation of content
Microsoft Clarity can be used to identify pain points in the user experience. Based on this information, you can optimise content and access to information. These can be, for example, announcements, important information or guidelines, as well as the structure of the navigation.
On the technical side, you can also recognise difficulties more easily with Clarity. If you notice frequent clicks or frequent bounces after a short time, this may be due to performance or a faulty embedding.
Personalisation of your intranet
With the ability to track user behaviour on your intranet, you can easily adapt and personalise your content to provide your employees with a more efficient platform for the information they need.
How we can help you with the integration into your intranet
Do you have a SharePoint-based intranet and want to use Microsoft Clarity? Our experts will be happy to assist you with the implementation. Intranets are our daily business and many of our developers and consultants have decades of experience and are equipped for all challenges.
Contact us and get more insights into user behaviour and a data basis for optimising your content by strategically integrating Microsoft Clarity into your intranet.