ClickDensity's visitor heat maps
A couple of months ago, as I was pondering how best to reorganize a client's navigation, I was thinking about how useful it would be to be able to see exactly how visitors view and click on their site. Unfortunately, because I'm a former experimental psychologist, that got me thinking about what I used to see in the eye-movement tracking labs, and pretty soon I had visions of having to hook all of our site visitors up to laser helmets and supercomputers. Now granted, lasers make everything better, but my idea was a bit far from being practical.
So, yesterday, I was surprised to discover a company called ClickDensity, which claims to be able to track the click density (in case you hadn't gotten that from the name) of your site's visitors. Thinking back to the lasers, I just about gave up on the concept as outlandish, but decided to give it a go. To my surprise, after about 30 minutes, a free trial, and a tiny chunk of Javascript, I was set to go.
The image to the right is a sample "heat map" from ClickDensity.com, and unlike so many other user metrics, provides a clean and intuitive sense of how your site is being used. By last night, I had usable (and interesting) data, getting my first clues as to which of two search forms on my client's site were being used more often and what fields got the most attention.
ClickDensity warns of issues with centered sites, and I imagine that complex CSS and DHTML can be tricky, but I experienced almost no problems. The clicks themselves seem to be mapped slightly offset from the buttons/links, which I assume is due to screen size and browser differences. That was easily solved, though, by comparing the heat map to the "hover map", which splits out any clickable element and gives the exact click count for it.
Of course, data is always open to interpretation. I had to realize, for instance, that there were no clicks on my "Home" button because I only was tracking clicks on the home page. Not surprisingly, very few people click on "Home" from the home page. All in all, though, ClickDensity represents the kind of simple and effective tool that usability analysts desperately need. Just as importantly, the heat map should prove to be a great tool for communicating usability issues to clients.
Update: Within about a half-hour of this post, Jon at ClickDensity let me know that the click offsets were due to my client's site having a "liquid" layout (it does, in fact, expand horizontally and vertically to fit the screen), and that a simple adjustment would correct the problem. I checked the "follow targets" box, as instructed, and as if by magic, everything lined up perfectly.
Sean F.
· Friday, December 1I can see how this would be a great tool to use prior to any site redesign to help analyze what is working and not working. I am uncertain what the longterm benefit would be other that to continue to highlight what is working or not working. I would guess if your site is changing often, this would be a good tool to see the dynamic shift in behavior.