Generate a heatmap of your site

I stumbled over a couple of very interesting sites today. Have you ever heard of Jacob Nielsen and heatmaps? Sure you have, how would you ever find this post unless you searched for “heatmap”,  right? (I also wrote about heatmaps last year).

Well, heatmaps can give you valuable information about your sites layout. Is it effective? Where does visitors look?

Such information can give you ideas on what kind of changes to make your site more effective and usable. But how does on go about an make a heatmap? Not all of us have some old eyetracking equipment lying about, nor do we have thousands of dollars to get someone else to do it for us, so basically we’re screwed.

Well, not really. There is a couple of services that you can use that doesn’t cost you a dime. Feng-GUI lets you upload a screen of your site and uses artificial intelligense algorithms to  analyse it and creates a simulated heatmap.

Below is a couple of heatmaps generated by the Feng-GUI AI. About the usefulness on these I have to reserve my opinion. It seems to place a lot of emphasis on images and I’m not sure this reflects actual user behaviour. I would love to see a validation versus real eyetracking experiments.

It is still interesing though.

The next site I looked at is Clickdensity . Unlike Feng-GUI Clickdensity tracks real user behaviour by tracking clicks using a small javascript that you put on your site. From the data collected a click heatmap is generated. This is a real interesting concept that I think is going to be useful

They even have a free trial, so what are you waiting for? Im running a test on a site right now, so we’ll how it turns out. I’ll post the results  here.

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