I am tri­al­ing Click­Heat. Click­Heat is an open source project licenced under GPL. It records the posi­tion of the user’s mouse on web pages, and cre­ates a heatmap.

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.

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Update: Fur­ther post avail­able here.