In Jakob Nielsen's latest book, Prioritizing Web Usability, the usability guru presents his latest discoveries on how to design usable web sites. His meticulous research is based on lab experiments, with thousands of users of diverse backgrounds.
Dr. Nielsen and his assistants observed how these users interacted with a wide array of sites, ranging from corporate portals to small business stores. The book contains solid, sound advice that is useful for anyone building an online presence. The conclusion is evident in the title of the book - usability needs to be a priority.
Getting advice from the book is great, but how can you measure the usability of your site? A number of new tools for tracking site visitors are raising the bar for website statistics tools. Particularly, instead of tracking the flat lists of usage and showing you illegible user paths, the next generation of site trackers is focused on giving you the insights on how people use a site. In this post we discuss CrazyEgg, which offers innovative ways of doing just that.
Like most good ideas, the idea behind CrazyEgg is simple - show the hotspots where users click on in a site. This information is not the same as popular pages; instead this is practical information about how and where people click on your site. More importantly, CrazyEgg's approach lets you understand the difference between where you want your users to click and where they are actually clicking.
Traditional site tracking tools offer you a ton of information, including:
Ironically, it is not possible to use this information to understand what users actually do on the page. Hence, these volumes of information are practically useless in deciding what is wrong with your web site and how you can improve it. The creators of CrazyEgg saw this gap and realized there is a big opportunity to help companies assess the effectiveness of each web page. Once you look at the problem from this point of view, it becomes obvious how important it is to measure and visualize the hot spots on each web page.
The service setup is straightforward and similar to all tracking services. You are given a chunk of JavaScript to drop into each page that you would like to track. For each page, you can setup one or more tests. This is useful when you are trying to measure the effectiveness of your changes. Each test is either time based or visit based:
After you start the test, it runs automatically and you can check the results while it is running - as well as after the test is finished.
The service presents the results for each test using three different methods: Overlay, List and Heatmap. While both List and Heatmap are useful, the Overlay method is the one you will spend most time on. In this view, each page is overlaid with the actual usage information. The user clicks are clustered and combined into markers; and each marker is colored based on the number of user clicks. This presentation gives you instant insight into what your users click on.
Each marker can be further expanded to see the number of clicks as well as percentage of the clicks in this spot, relative to the total number of clicks on the page. You can also drill in to see where the users that clicked there came from.
Looking at this picture allows you to determine whether your users are clicking where you intend them to click. Often, the results are surprising - because business concepts and the design elements that are obvious to you are sometimes foreign to your users. Because their context coming to your page varies, their clicks are not what you may intend. For example, one thing that you may not expect is that people click a lot on images - even if they are not linked. These clicks can be frustrating to the users, because their expectation to drill in and learn more is not met. And because attention is scarcity these days, any minor disappointment might lead them to leave the page.
CrazyEgg is a must-have tool in your web site arsenal, because it helps you improve the usability of your site - and improve user retention. It is complimentary to Stat Counter, Site Meter, Google Analytics and MyBlogLog (yes, you can install it on sites as well as blogs) and it will help you understand where your users are actually clicking.
But even CrazyEgg only shows you a static snapshot of user clicks. Another startup, ClickTale, is kicking the game up a notch by recording movies of how users interact with a site - and it automatically organizes the users by types of interactions.
Combine these tools with Dr. Nielsen's book and you have a system for improving usability of your site. Greater usability will lead to more users and ultimately to greater revenues for your business. Please tell us what measuring tools you are using on your site to improve its usability.
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Comments
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It definitely looks cool. But I think I disagree with saying that "Traditional site tracking tools" don't help with this kind of info. Lots of these tools like "StatCounter" have detailed visitor paths. At a quick glance I can see if people are going from the home page to some "undesirable" page. And doesn't the popular page show some of that too "Hey everyone is clicking on my 'more interesting links" page then they are on the 'sign me up scotty' page", maybe I need to make the "sign me up" link more prominent and friendly looking.
Posted by: Nate | April 6, 2007 7:07 AM
Nate,
Give CrazyEgg and try and you will see that this information is not easy to get from StatCounter (this is what we use for our site).
Alex
Posted by: Alex Iskold | April 6, 2007 7:12 AM
Alex,
We could not have explained the reasoning behind our creation of Crazy Egg better then you did! Thanks for laying it out so clearly, and introducing Crazy Egg to even more people :)
If anyone has any questions for us, please fill out the contact form on our website, or give us a call (the number is on the contact page).
Posted by: Hiten Shah | April 6, 2007 7:38 AM
This is an excellent write-up. I saw a blip about this the other day, but it didn't suck me in. This write-up got me to read the whole thing and I signed up. Thanks
Posted by: Jeff L. | April 6, 2007 1:11 PM
It definitely looks cool. But I think I disagree with saying that "Traditional site tracking tools" don't help with this kind of info.
Posted by: tech | April 6, 2007 2:06 PM
I use StatCounter on my site, but it can't tell me why people don't seem to see the menu at the top. I think it's really prominent and an obvious menu, but people ask me all the time where they should click to see my photos. Duh... click on the freekin menu where it says photos, dummy. This Crazy Egg thing still wouldn't be able to tell me that though. What I need is something that can track a user's eyes over the page and see why they don't notice the obvious LINKS!
Posted by: Jasmine | April 6, 2007 2:24 PM
You really think you're going to get an answer to a subjective question like WHY from software? WHERE they clicked instead, sure. HOW they got to this element, maybe. WHEN they overlooked your cool menu, but not why. It's from the answers to the other questions that might have a hope of figuring out a WHY. Ultimately, you need someone who can understand what the data actually means.
Posted by: Johnny | April 6, 2007 2:38 PM
I'll be honest - I'm not a fan of Nielson's work; his homepage is absolutely dire, and I've seen no evidence of his work producing anything worth an investment over a good web site designers' skills. However, Crazy Egg is a good piece of kit, and certainly worth considering when building a new site.
While MySpace exists as one of the (if not the number one) top sites on the web, Nielson's work simply has no weight. Usability should be measured on how many people actually use the site, not on how usable it could be in relation to one man's ideals.
Posted by: Neil | April 6, 2007 2:50 PM
We use a tracking program that comes with our hosting, plus Google Analytics, and have just started some tests with Google Website Optimizer. Now just signed up to have a go with Crazy Egg, and give it a test. Must say was disappointed with lack of additional info and help on the Crazy Egg site. this post gave more useful information, such as stating that it won't interfere with any other stats package you are already using, than is on their own site. I'm also not sure if my use of global headers and footers across all my pages causes an issue with use of Crazy Egg or not, may have to contact them on that.
Posted by: Bryan | April 6, 2007 3:58 PM
You may want to change the link to the site. Their dns set up is such that crazyegg.com doesn't work. It requires the "www." prefix. Nice front page, but when I click the "Sign up for free" page, it's a 404. What a doozy for a service that promises to measure what it claims to measure!
Posted by: Shanx | April 6, 2007 9:53 PM
problem with CrazyEgg is that its so easy to go over that limit. It only took me like 20-30 minutes on my forum to go over the limit. They need to allow more hits like instead of just 5000, how about something like 20,000. After all, there only collecting clicks and not heavy data intensive stuff. Plus Crazy Egg's pricing is insane, it costs way too much to get the basic level service - for that same price I could just buy a seperate server and install freely available Crazy Egg type software and run it off the server. There's already a really good Crazy Egg type script that does the whole heat/site overlay and it's free to use and run.
Posted by: Free Joost Invites | April 7, 2007 2:24 AM
This is an interesting service, but you are still better off doing a remote usability test with the likes of
http://www.relevantview.com/
or
http://www.keynote.com/
Posted by: david zotter | April 7, 2007 6:41 AM
If you have a big site and are really serious about your analytics and about analyzing your customer experience, you should have Tealeaf installed.
http://www.tealeaf.com/
While crazyegg looks cool, I'm still confused what it does that other tools do not (albeit, it does it in a simple and easy manner). The overlay feature is found in most analytics products, including Omniture, CoreMetrics, and WebTrends. Granted, for smaller sites I could see how this tool could be invaluable.
Posted by: pireland | April 7, 2007 9:28 AM
CrazyEgg is awesome, does anyone know of any other good alternatives though?
Posted by: Dean | April 7, 2007 10:08 PM
I dont know if you guys already use this or not, but Google Analytics provides the 'heatmap' mechanism for site visitors to view clicks, entry pages and exit pages... Not sure if a whole new service is required to do the same thing... I can see it does provide additional features.. but they arent that good....well not in my humble opinion.
It certainly wouldnt be worth having Google Analytics and CrazyEgg javascript in your page just for monitoring what users are doing at your site.. would be a bit overkill
Posted by: Sherif Mansour | April 9, 2007 5:07 AM
It's a good article I understand the business ideas. The service setup is straightforward and similar to all tracking services. If you are interesting visit the site business">business">http://www.ideacenter.com/">business ideas
Posted by: Ram's | April 9, 2007 2:40 PM
You can also check out some useful Crazy Egg analysis here:
http://www.friedbeef.com/2007/03/23/5-insightful-site-optimization-analyses-you-can-peform-using-crazyegg/
Posted by: Friedbeef | April 10, 2007 5:04 PM