Visualizing User Interaction with Crazy Egg
Crazy Egg is a web service that allows you to see what — and more importantly where — your site visitors are clicking on your page layout. Is this button in the right place? Is it obvious that that thing is clickable? It's no substitute for being able to watch a real person attempt to use and make sense of your site design, but for the budget-minded site owner, it's a useful tool for making ongoing improvements to layout. Here's how it works...
The idea is that you set up "tests" for specific pages of your site. The tests can run for a length of time, or stop after a specified number of visits. You drop a small snippet of JavaScript code onto your page that interacts with the service. The results are displayed in a few different ways: number and percentage of clicks by link, and a heatmap that shows your layout with a hotspot overlay indicating the physical location of the click. The service also provides a rank list of all clicks.
The heatmap is by far the most interesting and useful tool. Ordinary page statistics (that come bundled with nearly every hosting package out there), can indicate sufficiently where people are going on your site. I've know for years now that the Portfolio section of my site is the most heavily traveled area, so it was no surprise to see that link light up under the Crazy Egg heatmap.
What was surprising was to see the physical location of some of the clicks. Here's the perfect example:
Now, that whole upper left area on this site (logo and tagline) is a link back to the home page. Ordinary stats would only indicate how often that page is called. What the heatmap overlay indicates, however, is that people are actually clicking on the words "Design" and "Develop". This may indicate a couple of things:
- People are looking for, and expecting, content about design and development services specifically.
- The word "Manage" apparently means nothing to anyone but me, or site management is not something my customers want.
So what I should do is:
- Write content for those services and create individual pages for them.
- Make the header link function as people are expecting.
- Pick a better word for "Manage" or lose it altogether.
And that's just what I've gleaned from the logo at the top of the page. The entire heatmap overlay is filled with clues about how visitors are interpreting the layout and ranking the importance of content. Now that I have made an interpretation of the clues, I can tweak the layout and run a new test to see how that fairs.
One major thing I'd like to see: Presently, you set up a test by "page". When you develop sites in a CMS environment like we do here, a "page" is far less signiifcant than a page type or template (or whatever you might call it). For example, on the newly launched Nap Mats and More site, I set up a test for a sample product page. I picked a product that I thought would get a decent amount of traffic (it's featured on the home page). With the site being brand new and traffic only beginning to trickle in, however, the results for that test are hardly worth considering — there just aren't enough clicks to prove any trends.
All products on the site use the same template to display the product's information. What I'd like to be able to do, is set up a test for that template — maybe for everything containing the base URL string, followed by anything else. I'm sure there are plenty of problems with doing this from Crazy Egg's perspective. From my perspective, I can see possibly getting misleading data simply because content length and image size differences will push the clickable stuff around. However, I think if Crazy Egg wants us to take this service seriously, they'll work towards sorting out some way of doing this.
The service is a bit buggy as well. For some reason, I was receiving errors that the system was not able to archive some of my closed tests (these errors have since vanished). I'm also presently watching the Mac loading icon twirl endlessly at my Crazy Egg dashboard.
Aside from these and some general sluggishness the service is well worth checking out. I upgraded to the paid service and I'm running tests on nearly all of the sites I have recently launched and plan on doing the same for upcoming launches. If you're curious about what your site layout is doing, I'd recommend setting up a free account to get started. The novelty alone is worth it. If you can learn something about your site and make real improvements, even better!
Phil Hertzler | 10.27.06 | 3 comment(s)
Reader Comments
Thanks, Hiten. I’m definitely seeing the improvements. Even the sluggishness I mentioned in this post seems to have mostly cleared up! I’ll be sticking with the service for the foreseeable future. Keep up the great work!
Posted by Philip Hertzler from Richmond on 11.02.06 at 1:34
Philip, Glad to hear it, we do aim to please. Contact us for any thing you may need, or feedback you have.
Posted by Hiten Shah from California on 11.02.06 at 1:51
Hi Phil,
Glad that you are making use of Crazy Egg. We are working on some of the ideas you mentioned, as well as improving the stability and reliability of our service. Thanks for the feedback, we are always open to it and looking to improve Crazy Egg for everyone.
Posted by Hiten Shah from California on 10.28.06 at 2:08