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.