Pros and cons of Hotjar Engage for User Testing

Hotjar changed. I mostly hear complains, but let's talk about something positive: they offer User Testing now with their tool Engage. And the best thing: it's super quick, easy to setup and the costs are very doable.  

Cool stuff for User Testing

• Automatically have the conversation transcribed and download the text (multi language support)
• Record the participants screen and face
• Create video clips from the recording to include in the final report
• Your team can join as observers, make notes and ask questions in the chat
• Collecting participants is really quick (their pool is 175,000 people all over the world). People just schedule an appointment (PingPong) within the time frame you indicate. This is great when participants cancel, you can still find a replacement (true story). 
• If you can recruit your own participants you can use the tool for free. 

Some less cool stuff for User Tests

• Desktop focus: Participants can't share their screen on iPhone or Android. So if you're giving them tasks and want to see their screen, do so on desktop. Hotjar will also ask participants to join the User Test on Desktop. It does mean that your findings are mostly limited to desktop. 
• Since this is still a new product within their platform, they are still playing around with pricing. I recently used it and payed with credits, but I got an email this week saying credits are dead…

With the setup that Engage offers you can probably do much more too, like: interviews, card sorting, tree mapping, wireframe testing.