Win Report: When user behavior surprises you, pay attention

Published: August 2025

The client supplies sustainably harvested countertops for high-end kitchens.

Research: Is it hot in here?

This is a heatmap of one of the website’s high-traffic product pages. The colored spots help us understand where visitors are clicking or tapping on the page. (The hotter the color, the higher the use.)

When we look at heatmaps like this, we are playing the role of Sherlock Holmes. Some things are obvious—there’s a lot of action on the “See Sizes & Prices” button—but as the great detective was at pains to point out:

“It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.” — Sherlock Holmes

In this case, one of the “hotspots” stuck out to us as unusual because it wasn’t near the top of the page and wasn’t something we had expected to attract a lot of attention. To make it easier to spot, let’s zero in on the bottom of the page.

This section of the page features an “accordion” interface that can display or hide additional information about the product. As we all know, this kind of interface is used to include information that might matter to some people, but isn’t considered core content.

And yet, we could see from the heatmap that a high proportion of users were interested in Product Specification. This was a surprise to us and the client team, and gave us an idea for a nice little experiment.

The original page (or control)

Here’s the original page, with all the accordions closed by default.

The tested page (or variation)

For the variation, we made no changes other than opening the Product Specification accordion by default. That was it.

Result: +12% transactions

During the test, we observed a 12% increase in transactions from visitors who saw the variation (and the “open” Product Specification).

This result is a great example of how research and analysis, combined with a relatively simple test idea, can deliver big results.

We think Sherlock would be proud.

What next?

As usual, we added the test to our proprietary Wins Database, then looked for ways to apply its lessons to other parts of the client’s business and then to other clients.

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