Well, we’ve had some growth, enough to make our server run pegged all the time and make our website really slow. So, WIN, then FAIL. We’re on a (much) faster server now, and everything looks great.
This week’s release includes a feature we’re really proud of.
In addition to visualizing your mouse movement and clicks, you can see your “fold.”
There is much debate as to whether or not the fold still exists. We’ll leave the answer up to you.
Happy testing!
We pushed some changes to our screen shotter this evening. A few sites capturing the entire height of the page and we’ve made some tweaks to help with this.
Also new - you can upload your own copy of your screenshot if you aren’t satisfied with our auto-magic one. This is particularly useful if you use a lot of AJAX or Flash and we captured your page before it was completely done.
Happy Trailblazing!
We’ve been hard at work over the last 3 weeks to bring you an even better Trailhead. This release is huge!
(Deep breathe)
Free Trail
By far the biggest change in this release is that everyone gets one free test. We want you help you understand what’s happening on your site, make changes, and test again. Giving you a free test is an important first step, and we hope that you’ll love it enough to keep using Trailhead to test your improvements.
Simplified Pricing
We carefully studied results that our customers were getting and noticed that there wasn’t much difference between a 250 session test and a 2,000 session test (other than the bigger test can take a really long time). So, we dropped the two test sizes. Now there is just one 1,000 session test. Oh, and we made it cheaper. It’s now just $9 bucks.
Tools for repeat testers
We added two huge features for customers who want to test often: Test scheduling and pre-paid tests. When setting up a new test you have the option to run it immediately or schedule it for a specific time and day in the future. There is no automatic recurrence yet, but look for it in our next release.
Customers can also buy bulk packs of test at a really deep discount. Test are only $1 a piece if you buy 50!
Sign up
We made a lot of progress in improving the experience and usability of Trailhead this release. We were able to simplify our sign-up $rarr; first test flow and eliminate 2 screens. You can literally set up a new test in about 3 seconds.
New Dashboard
The dashboard is much better than our previous release. We’ve moved to a tabular layout that will fare much better for users who have a lot of test. We also eliminated the intermediate screen between the dashboard and the test viewer. It was confusing and clunky, so we got rid of it.
New Test Viewer
The test viewer has a whole new look and feel. The test options are now fixed to the right-side of the window and stay out of your way.
You’ll also noticed that we changed the “clicks” representation from the big gray ‘X’ to a more precise yellow triangle. We felt that the X got really messy when clicks were clustered closely together. The triangle is much more precise and appealing.
We experienced some server issues tonight. I would tell you about the miss-configured logger that filled up the hard drive, but, well, that’s kind of embarrassing… Instead, I’m going to blame it on a rouge band of ninja hackers. The end result being site slowness and delayed test completions. Our tracking code is designed to gracefully handle such attacks and this event did not effect your users’ experience on your site.
We have fixed the loggingdealt with the ninja hackers and everything is back to normal.
Trailhead as the New Heat Map Hotness -
So far I’m loving Trailhead and I really like the pricing model. It takes about four seconds to sign up and start a test and I suggest giving them a whirl if you’re looking to get some honest feedback about where those mice are really going.
Eye tracking has long been used to see which regions of a web page people tend to look at. Eye tracking literally records eye movement using specialized equipment in a controlled lab environment. It’s powerful technology, but it’s really expensive and not really accessible to most site designers. Trailhead can give you similar results for a fraction of the cost and effort.
As it turns out, people generally follow their eyes with their mouse when looking at a web page. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon demonstrated this result in a paper they presented at the 2001 ACM conference on Computer-Human Interaction.
Their full paper, What can a mouse cursor tell us more?: correlation of eye/mouse movements on web browsing, is available from ACM. In short, the researchers found:
84% of the page regions visited by a cursor were also visited by the eye, and the distance between the cursor and the eye focus was typically between 35 and 90 pixels.
In other words, if my mouse moves to a certain spot on the page, my eyeballs are probably looking there, too. The study goes on to conclude:
mouse device could be a very good alternative to an eye-tracker as a tool for usability evaluation.”
Trailhead tracks mouse movement on a page to see which areas of your site users are interacting with. The resulting heatmap shows the hot (and cold) spots on your page.
The bottom line: Trailhead heat maps are nearly as accurate as eye tracking, and are available on any budget and with very little effort.
For more, visit www.trailheadapp.com.
Have you ever seen eye tracking heatmaps? We think they are pretty darned awesomeinformative. But they are also expensive :( And you have to get people into a lab and get them to wear some funky headgear :( We built Trailhead to give you a way to gain the same insights on the cheap and easy. Test your live site, no headgear, and just $10.
We’ve been showing this to friends for a couple of weeks, here are answers to the questions we’ve been getting.
What does a heatmaps represent? The heatmap show where your users are interacting with you page. The more translucent and ‘hot’ the area, the more of your users interacted with that area of the page.
How do you track this? We watch where the mouse moves and where people click.
Are you going to keep charging me? Nope! Run your test for $10, no subscription or continuing monthly fees.
Will this slow down my page? The tracking it light weight and you’re users won’t notice anything. What is an issue is including code from a remote server - if the remote server is slow, you site becomes slow. We’ve all gotten stuck waiting on a page to include some ad code, or tracking, or a widget. To avoid this - we host our tracking script as a static file on Amazon’s Content Delivery Network (which is awesome). If our servers run slow or go offline your customers won’t notice a thing.
How did you build Trailhead? - Grails, Java, Tomcat, MySql, Linux, Amazon Web Services (S3, Cloudfront, EC2, SQS), 960 grid, Mercurial, and some hand-crafted javascript.