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.