What is this? Aurora Borealis on your laptop?
Not quite. It’s a heatmap - a sophisticated tracking method to observer where a statistically significant sampling of users eyeballs are focused on web pages. These change as our internet habits change - and borne from them are ‘best practices’. Some other methods to test usability are:
1. Scroll Heatmaps - showing how far down the page visitors scroll (useful for finding and optimizing the fold of a page).
2. Attention Heatmaps - showing where on the page the visitor shows the most attention (same as eyeball)
3. Click Heatmaps - showing where the visitors click on the page, results in the most “traditional” web heatmap.
4. Mouse Move Heatmaps - used for conducting accurate eye tracking on a massive scale.
5. Conversion Analytics - such as Form Analytics and Link Analytics.
But why does all this fuss matter? Ok, let’s say you sell overpriced t-shirts online (vintage bedazzled Ed Hardy ones), converting on your traffic at 2% selling at $100 each. From a 1000 visitors, that’s 20 conversions grossing $2000.
Let’s say enhancements in interface design resulted in a 0.5% improvement in your form completion rate. A 0.5% improvement in your conversion, though just a teeny decimal, now means 25 conversions at $2500 from 1000 visitors. Extrapolate over your first 100,000 visitors and your wise attention to interface design, now laced your coffers with $50,000 more. Attention to detail. It counts.
The trick? A 0.5% increase on a 2% conversion rate is actually a 25% overall improvement.
