Such eye-tracking research is not cheap, however. For teams who don’t have the research budget to do full usability studies, Trailhead provides a way of creating limited heat maps inexpensively: It offers one free test, and additional tests are $1-9 each, depending on how many one buys. Trailhead can’t track users’ eye movements, so it tracks mouse movements and mouse clicks instead, via a small piece of tracking code that is added to pages being tested.

Trailhead users can view the heat maps for each in-progress or completed test, and can make the maps public or private. For each page being tested, the resulting heat map begins with a static representation of the design, over which trails of mouse movements, and triangles showing mouse clicks are superimposed. One can turn any of these layers on or off.

Not surprisingly, the web design layer doesn’t display moving elements, so one won’t see how visitors interact with interactive elements that change, like drop-down menus, scrolling DIVs, IFRAMEs, Flash movies, or slide shows like the one on the WebWorkerDaily home page. Trailhead says that one can run tests on mobile sites, although I didn’t try this feature.

The folks at Trailhead let me run several tests, and I found creating them to be simple. One provides some basic information about the page to be tested, including its URL, when the test should be started, and the page’s width in pixels (Trailhead can’t run tests on sites with variable widths). Trailhead then generates a tracking code to be included on the web page. The test then appears in the user’s dashboard, which shows how much data has been collected so far. Since each test covers 1,000 user sessions, it may take hours or days to complete, depending on how much traffic the tested page receives.

A graphic designer colleague is skeptical of the usefulness of Trailhead’s heat maps. He points out that since Trailhead can’t collect data on how users’ eyes track web content, this tool would not be able to tell whether, for example, the click-through rate on a banner is low because the content is not interesting, or if it’s just not being perceived by visitors. There is also no way of separating out the behavior of new visitors from that of those who’ve been to the site previously.

Trailhead won’t replace full usability testing, or even traditional visit statistics from Google Analytics, AWStats, and the like, but for those with limited budgets, it may provide insights that complement other research.

Do you find heat maps useful?

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Report: The Real-Time Enterprise

Do you ever want to peek over the shoulder of your web site visitors to see how they move about and navigate? As site owners, we often make assumptions as to how people are getting to particular pages or using particular functionality. Armed with pages and pages of analytics statistics we focus on what people are viewing or searching for.

Sometimes, though, there is no substitute for just watching how people interact and use your site to really understand your users’ behavior. Usability and testing tool Clixpy hopes to make that possible.

Clixpy is a web tool that tracks and records everything that a visitor does while interacting with your web site. Every scroll, click, text entry and hover is captured in a video for you to view at a later time.

A convenient dashboard displays all of your captured videos.

Installation is fairly straightforward. A short piece of JavaScript is provided for you to place into the HTML of your site. The code is tied to your account and is independent of a particular web site, which is nice. This allows you to monitor multiple sites or pool your captures using just one account.

Clixpy captures are purchased in groups. Your first 100 captures cost $5, with discounts being available for larger buys. You maintain a credit pool and each capture just pulls from your available credits.

You do have some control of how and when your captures are taken, though. When turning on captures you are given the opportunity to set some parameters to limit how many or how long they will run. This allows you to target particular times of day or new feature releases.

The Clixpy folks provided me with a pool of credits for review purposes and I doled them out over the course of a couple of days on one of my sites. It really was informative to watch the recordings that Clixpy gathered. Seeing real users clicking around is interesting and challenged some assumptions I had about how people interacted with my site.

Since each capture pulls a credit, I was sort of irritated when I would get single page view recordings. My initial thinking was that these captures wouldn’t tell me much, but I now realize that careful examination of these sessions could help identify issues and offer insight as to how to make my site more “sticky” and reduce its bounce rate.

Clixpy generally works just as advertised but I did run into some issues. For example, a capture should include every page view by a user but I can clearly identify many instances in which the same user session is split among multiple Clixpy captures. As each capture session has a cost, it would be nice to not have them wasted like this. There were also a couple of instances where it seemed that the clicking through of pages didn’t quite match up properly and the timing of the recording was inconsistent.

Also, while not a function of the application or service, one irksome thing I noticed is that you need to register on the site before you are given any information on cost. Clear pricing information should always be provided before any user data is gathered or a sign-up is processed.

I also have some concerns about the privacy implications of Clixpy but, in general, it is just presenting the same type of information gathered by an analytics package in a visual format. Password fields are ignored and other form fields can also be disabled. For long-term usage I would be sure to include information in my own privacy policy alerting users that it is in place. Users can opt out of being tracked by any site using Clixpy by visiting the Clixpy disable page.

Clixpy isn’t a substitute for proper focus group or usability testing but a small investment could provide useful information that can be difficult to gather otherwise. Check out a demo of Clixpy or register for an account to get started.

How do you feel about “spying” on your site visitors with Clixpy?

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