A few years ago I stumbled across the ideas of heatmaps and recording for websites. This is one of the most potent user experience improvement tools available. The ability for visitor recording alone brings the task of watching a room full of users to your fingertips.
Visitor Recording
If you have not experienced this sort of tool, it is a game-changer. The way visitor recording works with these tools is that you place a javascript snippet on your web page. That is it. The code is typically only a line or two, and it sends information back to the tool for you to see what users do. You can see where they come from, what browser they use, and even where they move the mouse. You can also see this in real time. That allows you to see where users get “stuck” figuring something out or spend a lot of time with something on their screen. You can take this data to develop incredibly accurate A/B tests or tweak your calls to action. If you are not using these tools, then I highly recommend you try them out.
The List
Here are the tools we cover in this episode. Take advantage of the free trials and memberships to get the best idea for which tool is best for you.
Crazy Egg: crazyegg.com Great heatmaps and $30/month (billed annually)
FullStory: Fullstory.com $199/month. It has a huge amount of functionality. The free option is limited to one thousand sessions/month.
Lucky Orange: luckyorange.com $10/month. It has several useful features and tracks mentions. The dashboard is excellent, and it is easy to add multiple sites to the membership.
MouseFlow: https://mouseflow.com $29/month. The free option only allows one hundred sessions/month. However, the interface for recordings is one of the best.
Hotjar: www.hotjar.com $29/month. The free option allows two thousand pageviews per day. They have several features included with free including user polls, surveys, and instant feedback (which provides for rating with an ability to select parts of the page).
Inspectlet: https:inspectlet.com $33/month. The free allows one thousand sessions and roughly ten thousand page views each month.
SmartLook: www.smartlook.com 10 day trial. $32/month. The limited free option is not bad. It allows three heat maps, up to one hundred thousand monthly visits, but only three days history of history.
