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Stop Guessing, Start Testing

by   |  August 4th, 2010
Business & Finance, Tips-n-Tools, User Experience


 

 
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This is a brief share of two of my favorite UX application on the market today.


UX being ‘user experience’, and in the context of the web we mean understanding what the users of your website are doing. Do you know what your users are they looking at, what interest them on the page, and what are they ignoring on your website, or are you guessing?


These tool well help you stop guessing and will enable you to communicate better with users, creating more awareness, more inquires and more sales.



Clicktale

This is an amazing tool that allows you to get all kind of data about how people are using your site. The thing that really sticks out about this program is in addition to aggregate data, goal tracking, heat maps, you can also watch videos of your users mouse movement!


That’s right, well people are surfing your website there is some fancy javascript running in the background tracking the mouse movement and clicks of site users. What’s great is about half of the people that use a computer scan the mouse in the same location that they scan their eyes. This sort of tool can be very revealing and give you great insight to how a user moves through your website.


Website: http://www.clicktale.com/
The cost: free – $999


I have used this in the past and it does an amazing job at tracking users and making it easy to access deep actionable data. Be warned it may take a little time to set up and some time to go through reports, watch videos and tag actions. ClickTale is clear and easy to use, there is just a lot to see.



CrazyEgg

This tool is dead simple. I did a post on it a not to long ago, and this is an item I recommend for anyone. There is not a whole lot to it , but is what’s great about it.


You can see where people are clicking, via heat maps and dot maps. If you have a website and you want to see how people use a sales page or a homepage. More then just knowing what people click the most the visual display of data allows you to see patterns very easily.


Using this tool on a clients website, I found people were reading through a clients sales page and clicking a small ‘more details’ link down the page. The client didn’t think many people would use this link so there was not much effort put in to the following detail page, however CrazyEgg showed very clearly that half the people visiting this page clicked this link, putting up a flag that either we were missing a key piece of information or we needed to spend some more time on the following page allowing a clear path back to signup.


This tool is simple and visual allowing you to see user patterns


Website: https://www.crazyegg.com/
Cost: $9 – $99
but if your a mac member and want a trial run I have an account.



Don’t Guess!

Is having good clean design that makes a website understandable important?
Is having a solid business strategy very important?


Yes, of course these are very leading questions, but now we need to make sure our design and strategy are working the way we think they are. If strategy and design are important then we need to make sure these elements are working for us. These tools allow you to stop guessing and start tracking and measuring your site. Allowing you to make your users experience with your site better.


The first step to increasing conversion rate is understanding your users, not guessing.


Good luck and let me know of tools you use.


**Of course there is Google analytic, I recommend these tools in combination with Google analytic.

Ron Sparks

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Reader comments (2)

 

Ron, I want to take you up on your offer of a trial run on Crazy Egg. Let’s meet.


Lainie Turner | August 04, 2010

Sounds great we’ll talk soon :)


Ron sparks | August 05, 2010
 


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