However, the installation was so simple that I have nothing do add to the installation notes from the official site.

I have been using ClickHeat on my personal site and a few high traffic web sites. It has already proved useful on this personal site, as I noticed people had been clicking the graphical header at the top of the page expecting to be returned to the home page. However I had neglected to set this up, so I quickly made the change. Here is the heatmap that indicated this to me:

Here is a heatmap from a friend’s relatively high traffic social networking web site:

From this heatmap we noticed that most clicks were for opening message threads (as expected), but were surprised by the number of clicks to some of the more obscure options placed at the edges of the web site. As a result, the site is going to be redesigned so that these features are in the main left navigation bar to make the web site easier to use.

The system uses a tiny 6KB JavaScript library, and recording clicks only used a few bytes of bandwidth. The administration web site works quickly and doesn’t seem to be a resource hog at all.

You can download ClickHeat from the official web site here. It requires PHP and the GD graphics library, and is a simple install requiring no database. This UNIX permission calculator may come in handy when setting up directory permissions so ClickHeat can write its log files.

I have noticed a problem with the heatmap being aligned with the web site, and a separate issue with elastic layouts creating problems with heatmap display. There are already bugs raised for these issues on the project homepage, so they should be resolved in time.

Here are some relevant articles:

Tapefailure and RobotReplay alternatives
CrazyEgg and RobotReplay
CrazyEgg — Learn Your Visitors Habits
How Crazyegg improved our website overnight
Crazy Egg Launches Confetti
Crazy egg Review. Find out what people are doing on your website

A popular commercial alternative is CrazyEgg. The articles I have linked to will have much more information on the wealth of extra features that it has.

If you have any success stories from using heatmaps, I’d love to hear from you.

UPDATE: Paul Olyslager has sent me this article which gives a great overview of heatmaps and some of the alternatives to Clickheat.

ClickHeat heatmap screenshot

I previously tried a few different free trials of commercial heatmap systems. I dismissed a few as unreliable, and many were more than adequate. However, I’d like to have an open source project on my side like ClickHeat, as I could use the results as I wish rather than be tied down to a commercial supplier’s system. Also, ClickHeat will be free to use, although there will be time costs involved in implementing and maintaining it.

Heatmaps are a useful tool in user interface design and testing. While watching users use your web site or application in real life and real-time is ideal, heatmapping is automated and results from thousands of users can be analysed. Combined with metrics such as goal tracking with web analytics tracking such as Google Adsense, heatmaps allow you to compare different versions of a user interface and find the best to deploy.

I’ll update my weblog when I have some results from ClickHeat, and I also intend to write a brief guide on how to install and implement it.

You can visit the ClickHeat official web site here.

You can subscribe to my weblog using the subscription links near the top of this page.

Update: Further post available here.