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Remotely tracking visitors’ mouse movements to do live usability testing

I’ve been playing around with a closed beta version of Mouseflow during the last week. It tracks visitors’ movements on a website and lets you play them back, exactly as they were performed.

Think of it as a think aloud test without the sound.

My real-world problem
I wondered if people actually read the text paragraphs in my previous blog post comparing  iPhone and Windows Phone – or if they were just looking at the photos (they read it, thankfully).

A few highlights from this 21 mins session with a user from India, 5 timezones away follows after the video

  • 0:03 The user quickly scans the full article
  • 0:15 Goes on reading the second paragraph from the bottom
  • 0:37 Finds it interesting enough to scroll to the top
  • 0:46 Begins “reading” with with the mouse pointer. This is an interesting and very frequent pattern. I guess we all do this; use the mouse for no particular reason while reading text.
  • 2:42 The user has now finished reading the article.
  • 4:05 Begins clicking words. I’m not sure if this is in hoping they’re links, but I don’t think so rather than merely keeping the hands busy. Also, there’s a chance that this might be because they’re selecting and copying text.

And another surprising fact? This user didn’t even as much as take a glimpse of the comments. It’s as if the blog metadata section says “nothing more to see here”.

Giving away 100 invites
The good people at Mouseflow gave me 100 invites to give to whomever comes first. The invite is good for 10,000 free recordings, and you will be asked to complete an online survey at one point.

Create your account here and use this invite token: 3RUS4E

 
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  1. Claus Says:
    March 2nd, 2010 at 12:20 pm

    Sudden click behaviour: I know that I often click as a matter of habit, the habit formed from having to make sure that focus/selection is in a reasonable place for other actions. So clicking white background just to make sure scroll bars and everything will work.
    Background clicking is common enough to be optimised against e.g. at bold.dk – (which loads an ad if you click the background)

  2. vinay mohanty Says:
    March 2nd, 2010 at 1:54 pm

    a similar tool …http://userfly.com , I have been using this for some time. seems to work well.