Clicktracking VS Eyetracking March 10, 2006
It’s a while since I’ve noticed a Web 2.0 application called Crazy Egg which will show you (for free!) were the users clicked on your page using eye tracking analysis derived graphics such as heatmaps and some brand new visualizations for the overlays (colophon: my employer sells eyetracking services).
Let’s take a deep breath and try to understand whether or not this amount of data could be useful “to improve the effectiveness of your web site”.
I’d say that if you’re a part-time blogger or run a small ezine this kind of data could be of some utility to you, but if you’re a serious web application developer/designer or want to test the usability of your company /client site interface well, this kind or data are more or less garbage.
I strongly disagree with what is being said by Nick in the Weareseencreative post on the subject : you should really care what your users are looking at, otherwise you won’t be able to understand (and thus fix) why they aren’t clicking on a particular link or button (BTW Nick, the Tobii eyetracking suite we’re use tracks also the users’ clicks).
Moreover the users’ interactions with a site/interfaces cannot and shouldn’t be summarized to just the clicks, there a lot more: the images, the texts and the page designs which actively participate in designing the user experience.
The click is just the final step of a longer decision path thus showing where the user clicked definitely doesn’t explain WHY she clicked: I think that the most significative quote I can place here is that what really impressed me when I first approached eyetracking technology is that the mouse pointer is completely STOPPED during the whole decisional process; out of sight, I’d say).
And I think that is really important to designers and developers to understand WHAT the user looked at before clicking and WHY they looked at or interacted in a given way (and this is simply impossible with a mousetracking machine).
I don’t want to be misunderstood: my opinion is that Crazy Egg could really help to improve the overall usability of small and simple sites showing their creators what is clicked in a graphical way (a more complexe alternative could be a deeper stats/logs analysis, and my friend Lou could say more on this) but once compared to Eyetracking technology, its benefits simply disappear.
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5 Responses to “Clicktracking VS Eyetracking”
I agree, Nick’s statement is fascinating but wrong. I’d say that a statement that begins with “I don’t care about my users’ xyz” is doomed to be proven wrong in a way or another. Crazyegg is cool (but I think that log analysis software already feature this kind of visualization) but I’m thinking hard of its real usefulness. Maybe debugging forms and ajax interfaces. But it’s just a mueslification (I win) of data we already have… eyetracking is another thing. Now, tell me about /mind/tracking…
Hey Giovanni,
Yes, I probably should have said “I care less about” rather than “I don’t care about,” but I still stand my ground. Oh and mind tracking… I think you might be way too creeped out knowing what your users are thinking. Hehe.
Thank you for your post Matteo, it’s always nice to hear new opinions. First, I’d like to clarify a few things; We are not out to replace Eye Tracking studies, instead we are aiming to provide people with more information based on what CrazyEgg can discover about where visitors are clicking on a website. Eye Tracking studies are currently expensive and unaffordable to smaller companies and individual website owners. We are looking to provide everybody with a visual representation of analytics data in an effort to help them understand their visitors beyond the numbers found in analytics packages. I’d love to discuss with you guys how we can improve on
Aneil,
as I said in my post I really appreciate the work you’re doing and the info-vis power Crazy Egg indeed has. It’s an innovative way to use web 2.0 tricks and I’m really looking forward for Crazy Egg coming out from Beta.
I’d point that 90% of my post is a reply to Nick’s post, while the remaining 10% is stating that Crazy Egg could be a nice tool to scratch the surface of interface usability/effectiveness, and is, in my opinion, suitable for small/non-profit sites (which, as you point, probably cannot afford eyetracking or usability studies).
Would you use Google analytics to analyze Amazon.com traffic or would you prefere something more, let me say, “stronger”. That’s the point, IMHO.
I would like to thank you and Nick for posting your comments here and count me in whether you’d like to have more feedback.
It looks like a really interesting tool to me, and I’m glad you pointed it out. I’d probably differ with Nick as well: all these various methods are useful when applied appropriately. Some are hammers, some are screwdrivers, some are stapleguns; all depends on whether you’re working on a nail, a screw, a staple, etc. I can definitely see a nice combination of eye-tracking methods, like this lite version or one more involved, with statistical approach; they seem like they’d be quite complementary.