7 Incredibly Useful Tools for Evaluating a Web Design
An effective web design is one in which your users are able to find information quickly and in a logical fashion.
Do they visit the content you want them to visit? Are they looking in the right places of your web page? Are you able to keep your user’s attention, or do they just leave quickly?
It’s not just about the content either. If your design loads slowly - or if moving from one section to another takes a long time - it affects the user’s experience.
These things can be the make-or-break factors between a user clicking on a link to find more information, or the back button to find it elsewhere.
Some things to consider:
- Are important information being seen by the user?
- Are the navigation and action items intuitive?
- Is the user being directed to sections in a logical manner?
- Does the web page load quickly enough to not turn away the user?
If you’re interested in analyzing and optimizing your page layout - here’s some extremely useful tools that you can use to help.
1. ClickHeat
ClickHeat is an open source visual tool for showing “hot” and “cold” zones of a web page. It allows you to see which spots users click on most, and which spots are being ignored.
It’s very easy to implement on your website, you only have to include an external JavaScript file.
Download: Clickheat on SourceForge.net.
2. Crazy Egg
Crazy Egg offers a myriad of analytical tools to help you visualize what visitors are doing.
Features include: Confetti - allowing you to see what people are clicking on based on certain factors such as their operating system and where they came from, Overlay - providing you with tons of data about particular links, and Report sharing - enabling you to share the data with team members and clients.
The free version only allows 4 pages to be tracked - so use your top landing pages to get the most data.
3. YSlow for Firebug
A key tenet of a strong design is that, not only should information be presented in a logical and elegant fashion, but that it must also be served quickly, with very little delay.
YSlow for Firebug is a free tool for Mozilla Firefox that gives you information about your front-end design to see if it performs well. It gives you a letter grade (A through F) and outlines your web page’s trouble spots.
It’s based on the Yahoo! Developer Network’s “Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site” initially written by Steve Souders, who was once the Chief of Performance at Yahoo! and is now working over at Google on web performance and open source initiatives.
Downloads: Firebug extension for Firefox (required) and YSlow.
4. clickdensity
clickdensity is a full suite of usability analysis tools that will help you assess your web page design.
You can use heat maps showing where users click on the most, hover maps - which shows people scrolling over links but not clicking on them, and A/B Tests which allows you to change certain page elements to see which style is more effective.
The free subscription give you 5,000 clicks and only one page and one site to monitor.
5. ClickTale
ClickTale offers a lot of user data pertaining to how visitors use your website.
There are plenty of things you can look at such as average time it takes for a user to click on a link, a user’s hesitation on clicking a link, hover to click ratio, and much more. It also provides detailed reports and charts on your users’ monitor sizes to better optimize your web page design to cater for the typical visitor.
6. Clicky
Perhaps the most interesting feature that Clicky has is its real-time tracking and monitoring feature, called Spy (check out the demo here).
Besides Spy, there’s a host of other analytics data you can look at such as user Actions - which records click data from your users and Visitors - providing you user data.
7. Google Analytics
One of the best free services that Google offers is Google Analytics and probably the most well-known analytics tool. It’s incredibly easy to install and offers plenty of user and content data to help you learn more about your web pages’ performance.
It has a feature called Site Overlay, which gives you a visual representation of the popular places your users like to click on. It also offers data on bounce rates and your top exit pages (to see what pages make users leave).
So there they are, some of the best tools in the market to help you troubleshoot and optimize your page layout. In the end, it’s a combination of great content, as well as how you present this content — that will lead to an effective design.
90 Comments
Almakos
April 21st, 2008
Amazing. I didn’t know such tools exist. especially for free.
Thanks!
Ed
April 21st, 2008
Nice article, I princpally use Analytics, Clicky and Statcounter. I’ve also used reinvigorate (http://www.reinvigorate.net/) in the past who also have a nice real time desktop application you can install and it can trigger a “chi-ching” sound on your desktop when you make a sale - nice :)
I’m gonna check out clickheat though - looks nice
Nate
April 21st, 2008
Good list. I personally run heat click on my sever with php my visits. It’s good to see where people are trying to click on my site for navigation.
AndyEd
April 21st, 2008
You might also appreciate Stomper Scrutinizer — it’s a vision simulation embedded in a browser to help raise consciousness on the impact of design and even to conduct usability evaluations.
http://about.stompernet.com/scrutinizer/learnmore
Carlo of 77Lab
April 21st, 2008
Great Post Jacob!
ClickHeat is amazing!
Tony Chester
April 21st, 2008
Nice list here. We used to use Crazy Egg quite a bit but it started acting all wonky for about a week so we pulled it. This was about two or three months ago and it mainly was taking forever to load; therefore the page would never finish loading. Maybe we will revisit them again.
Copes Flavio
April 21st, 2008
Very nice list list, I especially like Crazy Egg :)
Pagealizer
April 21st, 2008
For landing page metrics try http://www.pagealizer.com/
Pagealizer helps site owners get insight on how powerful their site content is. We show you in great detail how long people stay on your page (effective bounce rate), how far they scrolled down the page and where they clicked.
Jacob Gube
April 21st, 2008
@Pagealizer - that’s a spiffy app.
For those interested, check out the demo page here: http://www.pagealizer.com/?page=report&type=demo
The free version looks very generous too… you get all the analytical data, the only limitations are: 200 clicks are tracked and no SSL support.
Thank you for sharing!
Josh Mock
April 21st, 2008
I’ve tried almost all of those tools at one time or another and would say that Google Analytics, CrazyEgg and YSlow have been the three that stand out even among these.
elamb
April 21st, 2008
Swizzle fa Shizzle, my nizzle.
Dan
April 21st, 2008
Great set of tools… YSlow is great and ClickHeat produces interesting results… Google Analytics is a must have for my business - Thanks!
Acronyms
April 22nd, 2008
I’m already using Crazy Egg, YSlow and Analytics. Thanks for the rest.
Alexei
April 22nd, 2008
Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! :-)
now using in Russia too!
Elijah
April 22nd, 2008
Goodness I wasn’t aware of that site analyzer from analytics, thank you!
Rajasekaran
April 22nd, 2008
Wonderful lists for site monitoring tools but you missed to list another great tool at http://sitemeter.com which shows the statistics very good.
http://filmreviews1.blogspot.com
sksee82
April 22nd, 2008
This is an excellent article. Kudos for compiling these tool and providing a brief yet easy to understand explanation.
cchana
April 22nd, 2008
some very useful tools, especially yslow, which i hope will help to improve the performance of a few sites i’m working on!
Tim Igoe
April 22nd, 2008
Cool selection of tools - Its very useful to see where users are clicking on your sites :)
ncdeveloper
April 22nd, 2008
Crazy Egg is NOT for a production website by any means. I use it for the EPA websites and while it looks nice and flashy, it is not accurate at all after a few weeks. The counts just seem to go loopy after a few weeks. Support is just as weak. Every time I called, it sounded as if I woke the guy up or pulled him away from a tv show. Obviously a small company that was unprepared for moderate to high volume. If you have clients that want a real and accurate heatmap, look elswhere.
JB1ker
April 22nd, 2008
YSLOW rules
Fubiz
April 22nd, 2008
Thanks
doodigger
April 22nd, 2008
Thanks for the education! Sooo much to learn!
deelirium
April 22nd, 2008
Clicky is amazing! I’ve also gotten a kick out of Robot Replay http://www.robotreplay.com
It records your visitors actual cursor movements so you can replay them and see how they are viewing the page. Creepy, but fun nonetheless.
rpgchat
April 22nd, 2008
Great tips! Thanks a ton, I hadn’t used YSLOW before…
Jacob Gube
April 22nd, 2008
@deelirium: Awesome share. The cool feature with RobotReplay is the “Form Replay” feature, which provides you data on how users fill out your web forms. Here’s the direct link to the video demonstration of Form Replay:
http://www.youtube.com/v/49vLlHX-x8M
It’s free, but I haven’t tried it out yet.
UPickReviews
April 22nd, 2008
Ok, I must say you rock!
Great tools.. I love Click Heat, its opensource… First time I’ve ever seen a tool like this as an open source. Great stuff!
Graphic Design News
April 22nd, 2008
great list, I wanna test out Click Tale I’ve heard a lot about it.
Justin
April 22nd, 2008
Great set of tools. Ive used analytics but the click heat is a great open source tool.
jive
April 22nd, 2008
I’ll be using these tools very soon. Thanks for finding them out :)
Matt
April 22nd, 2008
I’ve used Anayltics, and Clicky before, but none of the others. Clickheat looks promising so far. Easy to integrate into Drupal with the module. http://drupal.org/project/click_heatmap
Jacob Gube
April 22nd, 2008
@Graphic Design News: Hey Gino, thanks for dropping by, and I like the new look of youthedesigner.com.
@Tony Chester and ncdeveloper: Thanks for sharing your experiences with Crazy Egg. I tested the application on Six Revisions, and from my (albeit brief) testing it worked well.
Patrick
April 23rd, 2008
Has anybody else had problems with Crazyegg’s system being down? We use to use the paid service but had to rip the code off of our pages as it would prevent our pages from loading when Crazyegg was having problems.
Thanks.
Kim
April 23rd, 2008
I use Statcounter because it is free and very easy.
Chris
April 23rd, 2008
That clickheat and yslow tool looks amazingly cool.
marianna
April 24th, 2008
I tried “crazy egg” to my blog and I found the interface of the reports / results user - friendly and easy to use. I like the fact that it has different options as confetti and heatmap to view where the users are mainly focus.
Thanks for the nice evaluation tools!!!
SivaramanB
April 24th, 2008
With these tools interaction with static files is increased.It helps to explore more with out hard modification.It helps lot.
Matt
April 26th, 2008
I’ve tried a few of these out and only problem I’ve had is, at least for me, CrazyEgg has slowed my site down in terms of load time. Firefox sits there with “Transferring from CrazyEgg.com” or whatever for almost a minute. Anyone else had this problem?
Jacob Gube
April 26th, 2008
Looks like CrazyEgg, for the most part, is giving people problems. Thank you all for sharing your experiences. I visited their site about a couple of days ago and it timed out.
The one advantage of CrazyEgg that attracted me the most is their visualization reports; they are extremely eye-catching and easy to understand. As such, they’re perfect for presentations — for example, when you’re pitching to a new client or meeting with an existing one.
Erika
April 27th, 2008
Now, I must say that I was five minutes away from paying for the same type of services that ClickHeat provides…. so I’m glad I saw this site before I placed my order! Thanks a ton!
Matt
April 29th, 2008
CrazyEgg had some nice tools indeed, I hope they fix their server/speed issues in the future so I can make better use of them. The one out of this list I am most happy with is ClickHeat, mostly because its a local file. I’d already been using Analytics. Clicky was also fairly decent, although not much information concerning web design, more about the visitors in general.
Marc
April 30th, 2008
i have tried the heat maps from clickheat and crazyegg and they both are highly useful in conjunction with a standard analytics program like google analytics or webtrends
the bit analytics companies are dropping the ball with heatmap charting
Web Design Cambridge
May 3rd, 2008
Great tools…if I may add one I personally love:
http://www.statcounter.com
Fun Quizzes
May 4th, 2008
Holy cow click heat is great for my ad placement I really appreciate the reco’s
website design
May 5th, 2008
some very useful tools, especially yslow, which i hope will help to improve the performance of a few sites i’m working on!
shook_1
May 15th, 2008
You forgot Web Developer Plug-in for Firefox browser
hdr
May 18th, 2008
Wonderful list!
d3str03R
June 7th, 2008
Huur! This is wonderful listing.
James Alexander
June 11th, 2008
Highly informative post. Looking forward to testing some of the analytics software. May come back on “Fashion versus Focus” if relevent. Thank Rev. J. Smith (of Hacking Christianity) for the tip via Entrecard. ps I have no intention of indulging in religious warfare).
Cheers
JA.
Technoarchive
June 11th, 2008
i found out http://www.technoarchive.com/ also as useful
Nash
June 15th, 2008
Google Analytics is the best. The report is delivered by email, no need to login to Google.
danglingwrangler
June 19th, 2008
Gratifying list - Jaocob. Used many mentioned, but your insight and viewer comments make your site a frequent visit.
Share what you know… learn what you don’t
Danhbaweb20.com
July 2nd, 2008
Great link ! Thanks so much
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