Image heatmap


Image heatmaps are effective survey questions to gather feedback on images. Standard image heatmap questions ask respondents to select parts that they like, dislike, understand, or don’t understand.

They are useful in offering insight into consumer preferences regarding digital advertisements, packaging designs, and product concepts. Our image heatmap questions also auto-generate text boxes, which allow respondents to comment on their selections.

If you would like to gather similar feedback on text instead, check out our text highlighter questions.

Respondent view

Conjointly offers two types of highlighter: dots or brushes. The dots highlight type allows respondents to be more specific in pinpointing their selections, whereas brushes allow respondents to shade large regions effortlessly. Both come with text boxes that enable respondents to input their comments optionally.

Dots highlight type

Image heatmap (dots) respondent interface

Brushes highlight type

Image heatmap (brushes) respondent interface

Image heatmap question outputs

An image heatmap question produces the following outputs:

  • Heatmaps for areas that were selected by participants most often. The heatmaps are separated according to the dot/stroke types specified. In the following example, the dot types are Like and Dislike, while the brush types are Understand and Don't understand.
  • Word clouds that show the most frequent words used in respondent comments.
  • The number of participants who saw the question.

Dots highlight type

The dots highlight type output shows the specific areas respondents clicked, with darker regions resembling more clicks.

Click on any area on the heatmaps, and you can view the responses for that particular area.

It also provides descriptive statistics, including mean, standard deviation, median, minimum, maximum, and mode for each feedback type.

Brushes highlight type

The brushes highlight type output shows the entire areas respondents shaded, with darker regions resembling a higher frequency of overlapping.



Image heatmap (dots) filter comments
Image heatmap (dots) outputs
Image heatmap (dots) outputs
Image heatmap (brushes) outputs

Remove participants directly

Once you see a nonsensical response, you can directly remove it from the outputs. Click on Show all responses, then hover your mouse over the response you want to remove, right-click, and click on Exclude this respondent from the report.

Remove response directly

Setting up an image heatmap question

Follow these steps to set up an image heatmap question.

1. Add question

Navigate to the Add questions tab and click on the Add question button at the bottom of the page.

On the Add or import questions pop-out, select the Add a new question tab and click on the Image Heatmap question card to add it to the experiment.

Add image heatmap question to survey

2. Edit question options

Once you add the question, you can adjust several settings:

  1. Set the highlight type to dots or brushes.
  2. Edit the question text by typing in the question text box.
  3. Upload an image from your computer by clicking on Add image or fetch an image from a URL by copying the URL into the link section.
  4. Set the types of dots or strokes respondents can add to the image. You can also specify the colours, minimum, and maximum number of dots/strokes.
  5. For brushes highlight type, you can choose the default size of the brush.
  6. Input the number of characters you require in comments by editing the From and To fields, next to the possible number of characters in comment. The default setting will be from Any to Any, in which respondents are allowed to skip comments.
Image heatmap setup page

Setting up the monadic view of image heatmap questions

The Monadic Test is an effective and efficient way to survey respondents with multiple image heatmap questions, which allows focussed testing of visuals. Check out our comprehensive guide to setting monadic image heatmap questions.

Please note that when two images are included as a single stimulus, the heatmap is generated based on the first image.

Image heatmap monadic block

The monadic image heatmap questions generate a summary table of outputs for all questions within the block, and outputs for individual questions.

Table of summary for monadic image heatmap questions