Recording navigation and heatmaps

Understanding how your users interact with your app is the purpose of Smartlook. During a typical session on a mobile app, a user might have to navigate through several screens to achieve their goals.

Smartlook tracks these transitions automatically and records them as navigation events. These events are available on the Smartlook dashboard. Another usage of navigation events is to generate heatmaps.

Properly dividing the user flow into individual screens is important for correct heatmap generation. Each heatmap is generated for a particular screen.

However, the accuracy and usefulness of auto-tracked navigation events depends heavily on the way the application UI is composed. Smartlook understands apps that use standard UI kits for each platform very well. However, if the application is made using a third-party framework, such as a gaming framework, the Smartlook SDK cannot detect the navigation logic of the application. Details about the extent of the auto-detection of the navigation events on each platform are provided in the API Reference.

In these cases, navigation events must be tracked programmatically.

Custom navigation events

Custom navigation events are tracked by calling Smartlook.instance.trackNavigationEvent("screen-name").

The method also accepts an optional parameter to denote the navigation direction: whether the app enter or exit the screen. The exit event also records the duration from the previous corresponding enter event.

For more information on navigation events implementation, consult each platform API documentation.

Heatmap galleries on Android and iOS

To generate a heatmap for mobile projects, you need to choose a date range. Smartlook automatically creates a gallery of the app within that date range including all automatically tracked navigation events and custom navigation events.