Usability Metrics Redux

There are a number of more thoughts about Heatmaps and Clickmap technology.  I was reading Avinash's latest blog post and stumbled across the new Google Analytics "In Page Analytics".  Wow, click maps right there!  Very cool.  This shows the clicks on my other web site and can give me some insight into where people are clicking.  The good part is the "below the fold" orange bar that shows only 10% of people are scrolling down and clicking.  This is very useful and more helpful than the pretty heat maps out there.

In my summary over the past month, these are the observations that I have with the whole click and heat map world.

• Heatmaps are focused on pages. They are not process or session based and do not focus as much on objectives ("Did they convert"?) Still, in some cases,  mainly experimental, I can leverage them for a short term project. In most blog purposes, heatmaps are not that useful. 
• Scalability is tricky.  Few click maps can handle large loads so they sample your customers. This is okay, but still, full analytic tools like GA or Tealeaf give more useful data. 
• Mouse tracking cool, but why? I just can't get my brain around it,  but do I really need to see all the mouse-over or follow the mouse replays?  Wouldn't a click map tell me more useful and quantitative stuff
• Click map replay. It is interesting, but how to you identify which one you want to view?  There are sites that allow you to replay your clicks and mouse events, but how do you select them? Randomly?  If you want replay, use Tealeaf or Coradiant that allow you to search, select and then replay end user sessions.
• Got AJAX? Well, none of this technology really works with dynamic sites yet.  They rely on static pages or slowly moving pages.  So blogs and content sites are fine, but if I'm selling or providing news, not so sure this will be valuable.

While heat and click maps are pretty cool, I think using conversion tools like web analytics or Tealeaf to determine pages of interest, perhaps a heat map or two then.  But then using A/B testing will be more useful. Which page will increase conversion or acquire more customers? 

Why Heatmaps?

More and more of my customers have the request for heatmaps and usability metrics. While my snide comments of "eye candy" were my own personal thoughts originally, I decided to think and study the use of heatmaps to help improve the customer experience.

What Do People Do with Heatmaps?
My first real thought was "what do you really do with a heatmap"? A lot of folks in the Search Engine Optimization space use them to check their ad effectiveness. As seen below, the hotter part of the screen (red) indicates where the majority of users clicked. You can see on the far left, some clicks in green, but most are around the top of the page, to the left.

Okay, if I'm placing ads, I get this.  In the end, what people want is some other way to visualize where people are navigating to make the page "better".

What are People Hoping to Gather?
I have asked my customers and most of the metrics and statistics they are looking for are as follows:

• % of people who click an item or menu
• % of people searching vs. browse the page
• People who are scrolling down
• Tracking mouse overs and movements
• Do people use all the fields presented?
• Do they click the call to actions
• Do they navigate with the sidebars or heading tabs
• Are the carousels or other widgets being used?

What are Good Questions to Ask?
While a bunch of metrics are great to have and save for analysis paralysis, this leads us to the place to begin, what questions do we really need answers to?

• Does traffic source influence which clicks do people make?  Do I need landing pages for every campaign or can I just use the home page and everyone gets what they want?
• Do people click on the image or text ads on the site?  Do people even click ads?
• Are people clicking on the main call-to-actions on the page?
• Are key components grouped together nicely?  This will help to prioritize the page layout.
• Are people finding what they want quick enough? Are they clicking on "About Us' to get to "Contact Us"

I realize a lot of marketing folks really like heatmaps since they convey a pretty picture, but like any tool, without the right context and questions, they tend to only generate red herrings (tangents that are a fun journey but not that useful).  The best use of heatmaps is to establish a process for usability metrics and a strategy to integrate with Multivariate Testing and Customer Experience Management systems.

Too much AJAX

In my role as a customer experience consultant (with Tealeaf), I get to research many types of web sites built by a variety of organizations. Focusing on usability issues, I get to analyze web site implementations where the use of AJAX is a big factor today. Alas, too many sites have gone wild and crazy and deliver too much AJAX.

Back in the old Web 1.0 world of ten years ago, developers broke business processes into nice, consumable chunks called pages. It was easy to break down a business form into nice logical pieces that were easy to implement and easy for customers to understand. For example:

• A loan application. You filled out your personal information on one page, next your financial, next your employment, and finally a confirmation page.

• Buying a product. A search page, product description, shopping cart, and purchase pages.
• Booking a hotel. Enter your travel dates, desired location, search, select, and purchase.

All nice and logical, right? The greatest part is that the sites are easy to support as well as functional. If a form needed fixing or page need tweaking, you only had to troubleshoot that page in the process. Making changes and rolling them out was not that complex or earth-shattering. Life cycle management of Web 1.0 sites was reasonable, easy, and cost-effective.

But the introduction of too much AJAX now replaces this easy life cycle with complex, insupportable models. The worst is the insurance industry. They seem infatuated with taking very complex, ten page processes and slamming them into one page AJAX nightmares. In order to debug a problem on the eighth end user page, the developer has to start at the first page, enter in pages of test data just to get to the eight page. What used to take 10 seconds to test now takes minutes. Over and over again. And we haven't gotten this into the user's hand yet! Ouch!

Now try compound all this client-side AJAX in all the tablets, phones, and laptops coming out. Yikes! To me it seems like a plot by the consulting and design firms to keep fat support contracts to support all this spaghetti code. Yuck. Too much AJAX.

Thank goodness some sanity is out there. Retail sites seem to get it and avoid too much AJAX. Also, the new design models based on HTML5 and Responsive Design appear to lead the next generation back into supportable design models, with simpler code implementation and avoiding the too much AJAX applications that have 80 JavaScript files to build a business process in the browser.

Best Practices

In my travels with my customers, I've come to understand where AJAX in a page makes sense. Here are just a few:

• Vehicle look-up. When I pull down a menu, an AJAX call fills it with only the cars I need.
  
• Search terms as I type. As I type "laptop", the search bar autofills other searches to save me time.
  
• Content display as I navigate. As I interact on the page, content appears or pops up that is relevant to me. AJAX calls make this possible, improving my customer experience.
  
• Inventory checks. On the same product page, knowing it is really in stock is very helpful. Ditto for shipping charges and taxes.
  
• Filtering choices. As I select certain dates, only the Hotels with openings are listed, as I filter on brands, the page refreshes with content.
  

Using AJAX, just the right amount, makes for a wonderful site experience. Hopefully the mobile and tablet evolution will return us to the middle, blending the best of web 1.0 and web 2.0, giving us sites that are:

• Sexy interfaces that are fun to use
• Easy for developer's to troubleshoot and support
• Leveraging the devices that I want to use
  
• Keeping support costs down