Usability Testing : Heat Maps

To understand users & their usage patterns online, we can use a testing tool called “heat maps”. By using heat maps, we can produce visual displays of where end-users are actually clicking and which ones are the popular locations on your website (or a specific page).

Heat maps provide you an insight for “sensitive areas” on your website which you can use to provide better placement to core content or promote product or information you are willing to highlight on your website to increase online sales, etc.

Heat maps are used to understand the user’s behavior on a web page for which the heat maps have been generated.

The core idea of using a heat map is to analyze/test how a user is interacting with a web site. What links are they clicking on? What kind of page design may work well? What functionality placed at different zones can work better? We can get help from such heat maps to understand some missing factors in our application.

For example, if a button is not getting any or less clicks even though it’s a button, then there is a serious issue of “affordance“, which tells us that the design of the button is not intuitively implying its functionality and use.

The screen shot given below is a heat map overlay for this ‘Usability Factors’ blog homepage (April 2009). The “warmer” areas depict more clicks.

Heat Maps generated for Usability Factors blog homepage

According to Jesper Rønn-Jensen, there is a difference in the results collected by mouse-tracking because it’s skewed by the mouse (or “pointing device” to put it in academic terms). You can read more about at: http://justaddwater.dk/2006/12/21/usability-heatmaps-eyetracking-vs-mousetracking/

For Eye-tracking and heat map tools, please see:
http://crazyegg.com
http://www.punkyduck.com/usability-accessibility/usability-reporting.aspx

For more information on Eye-Tracking, please see:
http://www.useit.com/eyetracking/
Download White Paper (PDF)
http://www.webusability.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/eye-tracking-white-paper1.pdf

Please provide your insights on this! Thanks.