Mousetracking
Under Mouse Tracking (too German about: mouse-observation ) refers to the recording of mouse movement in the interaction with the computer. (Movements, clicks, dwell time, scrollings). Mousetracking is mostly used as a usability test method for websites. In this context, mouse tracking primarily focuses on the efficiency of websites. In the context of efficiency, a user-friendly website is a page on which the user can reach his goal quickly and successfully. As an alternative to classic usability tests, mouse tracking can often achieve a higher number of cases, which enables better quantification and thus prioritization of the problems. You can also observe the users in the real context of use, outside of a laboratory situation, and thus record and analyze real user behavior.
Mousetracking has recently also been used in basic research in cognitive psychology to research cognitive conflicts between action tendencies and their dynamics.
Mousetracking Technologies
JavaScript
JavaScript is a programming language integrated in modern web browsers, with which the mouse movements of the user can be recorded. For this purpose, a program code is inserted into the source text of the page. The JavaScript code establishes a connection to the tracking service provider's server and pulls context data such as the configuration of the user system or the URL of the loaded page and starts mouse tracking within a coordinate framework.
Advanced systems save and transfer the DOM tree ( Document Object Model ) of the page including dynamic changes in order to restore the original page at the time of playback.
Plug-ins
A plug-in is an optional software module that extends or changes existing software. The mouse tracking data provided by plug-ins is no different from the data provided by JavaScript. The only difference between plug-ins and JavaScript data is that the user has to install special software with the plug-in.
Procedure
A distinction is made between the following methods of mouse tracking:
- Analysis in the usability lab on specially set up computer systems.
- Remote mouse tracking, in which the analysis can be carried out independently of location. However, the installation of tracking software is necessary. (e.g. Morae)
- Non-reactive mouse tracking, in which the recording takes place without installing software and dedicated preparation for a test situation. (e.g. m-pathy)
Methods of data evaluation
The data recorded using mouse tracking can be evaluated using various methods.
Single videos
With various tools it is possible to watch individual videos of the users. The individual videos can be used to view user behavior on an individually detailed level and thus achieve a deeper understanding of user behavior. The videos are not limited to individual pages, but can span multiple pages.
Heat maps
Mouse movements, clicks and scrollings can be shown summarized by several users. Such aggregated views make the user's attention visible and incorrect clicks can be detected. The so-called scrolling or visibility maps show how far the users scroll down and thus which areas of the page are actually perceived.
Form analysis
With the help of the form analysis, characteristic values can be determined for each individual field of a form. This includes the cancellation and correction rates, as well as the interaction time (the time it takes users to fill out the field). In addition, the occurrence of error messages can also be recorded.
Modern mouse tracking solutions allow anomalies in the aggregated views to be examined more closely by filtering the associated individual videos.
Applications
Usability testing + conversion optimization
Mouse tracking can be used to test and analyze the usability of a website.
As shown in the adjacent figure, the process of usability testing consists of different phases. The reasons for checking usability are often high abort rates in the respective process steps. The source of the breaks can then be identified using special analysis tools. The next step in uncovering the reasons for the termination is the analysis of user videos. In order to ultimately determine the severity of a problem, you can filter these users and quantify how many users are affected by a particular problem and how many of them drop out as a result. These key figures can serve as a measure of importance for this usability optimization.
Examples of usability problems
- Badly placed buttons can be discovered by using a scrolling map to identify areas of a website that are not initially visible and are not discovered by the user by scrolling.
- Specific problems of mobile users can also be uncovered with the help of "mouse tracking". Touch gestures, such as zooming on product images on which zooming is not possible, can be detected in user videos and identified as problematic by filtering and quantifying the users concerned.
Quality management
Quality management refers to all organizational measures that serve to improve process quality, services and thus products of any kind, in this case primarily websites. It is important to make the processes objectively verifiable.
In eCommerce in particular, it is necessary to be able to react promptly to malfunctions due to technical problems or usability hurdles and to identify the source of the problems.
This can be achieved by tracking and evaluating the behavior (mouse tracks, mouse clicks) of a large sample of real users. By drilling down on individual videos, changes in aggregated key figures (e.g. conversion rate) can be explained.
Website customization in real time
Tracking mouse movements can be used to tailor an interface to user interests in real time.
Information such as B. a long period of time the mouse is in a particular location and the mouse's career can be used to assess the level of interest in that subject.
The knowledge gained can be used, for example, to suggest products or information that could be of interest to a specific user.
Basic research in cognitive psychology
In cognitive psychological experiments, in which the participants can choose between different options, the mouse movement is an unobtrusively detectable indicator of conflicting tendencies to act. The stronger the conflict, the more the mouse movement deviates on average from a straight movement towards the selected object. This makes it possible to detect very subtle action tendencies that do not always have to be accessible to consciousness. The method was used in categorization tasks, risky choices between options, perception of spoken language and social cognitive tasks.
swell
- ↑ Michael J. Spivey, Marc Grosjean & Günther Knoblich: Continuous attraction toward phonological competitors . In: PNAS Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . tape 102 , no. 29 , 2005, pp. 10393-10398 .
- ↑ iX: On the trail of the mouse. In: iX. Retrieved September 15, 2016 (German).
- ^ Roman Rammelt: Berlin Usability. In: Berlin Usability. Retrieved September 15, 2016 .
- ↑ Mouse Tracking - Overview of use and tools - DieProduktMacher GmbH. October 4, 2013, accessed on September 15, 2016 (German).
- ↑ Mouse tracking: look over the shoulder of the visitor. Retrieved September 15, 2016 (German).
- ↑ Google Eyes Mouse Movement as Possible Search Relevancy Signal. In: www.webpronews.com. Retrieved September 15, 2016 .
- ↑ Qi Guo, Eugene Agichtein: Exploring Mouse Movements for inferring query intent . In: Proceedings of the 31st Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (= SIGIR '08 ). ACM, New York, NY, USA 2008, ISBN 978-1-60558-164-4 , pp. 707-708 , doi : 10.1145 / 1390334.1390462 ( acm.org [accessed September 15, 2016]).
- ↑ Jeff Huang, Ryen W. White, Susan Dumais: No Clicks, No Problem: Using Cursor Movements to Understand and Improve Search http://jeffhuang.com/Final_CursorBehavior_CHI11.pdf
- ↑ JB Freeman, R.Dale & TA Farmer: Hand in motion Reveals mind in motion . In: Frontiers in Psychology . tape 2 , no. 59 , 2011.