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Heat Maps: Getting Crazy with Crazy Egg

We humans tends to be visual creatures. Given a choice between long lists of statistics or pie charts and scatter plots, we gravitate towards richer ways to view our data. The usability world is no exception, and the granddaddy of seeing the online user experience in action is the heat map, a visual representation of activity on a web-page.

Recently, a handful of companies have tried to bring heat maps out of the laboratory and into the hands of web designers. One of these products is Crazy Egg, a javascript-based, add-on analytics tool that creates heat maps from website visitor data. A free version of the software is available, which limits you to tracking 5,000 visitors per month. Installing Crazy Egg requires access to your source code, but is relatively simple and is very similar to setting up tools like Google Analytics.

Crazy Egg Overlay View

I've run a short test (500 clicks) on User Effect to give you an idea of the kind of results that Crazy Egg returns. Shown above is the "overlay" view, which color codes each clickable item on the web-page according to the relative density of clicks over the course of the test. The red box is a blow up of a single item; it shows the overall click count for that item as well as the percentage of total clicks the item received. In this case, my "About" page was the most popular link, registering 15.1% of total clicks.

Crazy Egg Heat Map View

The image above represents the more traditional heat map view. Given my relatively short, 500-click test, the hot areas are a bit small, but there are obvious concentrations of clicks in all of the expected places: the menu, internal and external links, logo and search box. Again, most of the clicks on my site were concentrated in the menu bar, which is hardly surprising.

Heat Maps vs. Click Maps

It's important to note that the "heat map" Crazy Egg generates is really more of a click map. In usability, a heat map is typically created from eye-tracking data, and represents the areas that people most frequently look at. Crazy Egg and similar tools can only track where a visitor clicks. Presumably, if I'm doing my job, a great deal of attention is being paid to the middle of the page that contains my actual blog posts, but since this is relatively free of links, a click map makes that area appear inactive.

While the two kinds of heat maps really shouldn't be compared, that doesn't mean that a click map is without value, especially given the price tag. Technically, click data can be found in your web logs and tracked through just about any analytics package, but aggregating that data into a visual map is helpful for sorting out whether people are clicking on the places you think they're clicking (and/or want them to click). If an area seems to be getting overlooked on a click map, it may indicate a usability issue with your link placement or design. In addition, Crazy Egg has the added benefit of tracking outbound links (which can't be tracked by traditional log analysis), which can help you determine the kinds of information your visitors are most interested in.

All in all, I'm a fan of experimentation. There are many usability purists who will tell you that there's only one right way to do things (and, of course, most of them disagree on that one way), but I think there's value in having as many perspectives on your visitors as you can find. Crazy Egg and similar click mapping tools are one more way to look at your website in a new light and represent the first generation of tools designed to bring complex, laboratory usability testing within reach for web developers and small businesses.

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