Website Hotspots/Heatmap
Posted in Web Design | No Comments »
January 21st, 2010
Not to be confused with image hotspots, or wifi hotspots. This form of hotspots is used for keeping a track of what your sites visitors are looking at.
Most people when reading through a website will be using their mouse to guide their eyes, it means they will be ready to click through on a link, or take action straight away when they need to.
As such, we can track what people look at, and better understand our website, like where things should be placed if we want to give them more attention.
Hotspots – Usage
I haven’t started using this method of tracking on any of my sites yet, but am looking into it.
Apparently, though, the javascript that tracks movement can slow down the websites loading, which would perhaps suck slightly.
Anyway, I think it would be a useful tool when it comes to making alterations to a site. It would give us an idea on where we should move more important elements, or information we want to draw attention to. It would also tell us whether or not our leading lines, or attention grabbing techniques are actually working.
Focus
From what I can tell, these maps are used mainly used by advertisement companies, as indicators as to where best to place there advertisements.
I see no reason why they shouldn’t be used as guides to designing websites though, within reason of course.
People expect sites to follow a fairly generic standard of placement, when it comes to images, navigation, and content, so the ‘heat’ marks should follow that standard to a degree.
We shouldn’t place advertisements or irrelevant things on these spots, because if someone doesn’t want to see it, rather that hanging around or looking further into our site, they will simply click out. We can use these heat guides as places to put relavant information and catchy headlines.
We wouldn’t base, say for example, a new site design, on the prexisting sites heatmap, because the view would shift based on the information displayed.
…Anyway this is something I will be looking into further.
