If you are a Web developer, or webmaster of a site, how do you know what your users do on your page? Tracking “eye traffics” on a web page is an expensive process where professional companies analyze their company’s web site for usability issues, and use the results to help web developers improve the web design, and improve usability.

Corunet, El Blog has posted a means to capture users’ mouseClicks using zero budget, and converting the data into a heatMap. By overlaying the heatMap onto a screenshot of the web site, you can see whereyour users gravitate their mouseClicks. And thus eliminate useless URLs to improve usability. The entire process has been documented here (and here). The heatMap capturing program (released under GPL) can be downloaded at SourceForge.

This is how the heatMap looks like after the overlay process:

Heatmap for Mouse-click (hence, a click-map)

Corunet’s overlaying technique comes at a right time. My development team has created a similar overlaying task for information trail, but haven’t explored Perl, or ImageMagik like Corunet did. Perhaps we can learn from this method to improve ours.