The User Interface (UI) of any system is critical to the success of the application, and that is why major software companies have roles for UI experts. But now you can record and then watch the trail of your consumer clicks thanks to a product from ClicTale.
Clicktale has a useability study (part 1 and part 2) which discusses findings based on their tracking service.
The key ones are
• While most web pages have a vertical scroll-bar, visitors scrolled all the way to the bottom in only 20% of the recorded visits.
• Users scroll based on relative position inside the page, not based on absolute position in terms of pixels. In other words, the same number of page viewers will tend to scroll halfway or three-quarters through a page, regardless of whether the page size is 5,000 pixels or 10,000 pixels.
• The top and bottom of a web page are the most valuable areas in terms of visitor attention. Users spend an average of 24 seconds near the top and 14 seconds near the bottom as opposed to 8 seconds at the middle.
In addition ClicTale has release a heatmap product which describes
- Attention Heatmap shows how much attention a specific webpage area is getting from the visitors who visited that area, as measured by average time.
- Total Time Heatmap shows the total time that all visitors were exposed to a specific webpage area.
- Visitors Heatmap shows the number of visitors and the percent of all visitors that looked at every area including the page bottom.
- Pageviews Heatmap Given that a single visitor may visit a webpage several times, the Pageviews Heatmap shows the number of pageviews recorded at every area on the webpage.
I think this service is a great tool for monitoring the way people navigate your site.
