90 percent of everything : Usability Blog

Written by Harry Brignull

Clicktale seems like it’s matured quite a lot since it launched. They have an interesting take on analytics – instead of going for a pure stats approach like everyone else, they are trying more of a click & keystroke logging approach, where they track your users’ mouse movements and key presses, reconstructing this data in various ways for you on your Clicktale dashboard, including video playback of each user, heatmaps, and now, form analytics.

I originally tried Clicktale when they first launched, and although the video playback tool was very impressive, it also felt quite raw. You ended up drowning in video data – not quite knowing which videos to watch, nor how to get to the bottom of it all. I haven’t looked at their service in months, but glancing at it now, I can see that they’ve been working very hard at addressing this very issue.

I’ve been chatting to Kevin Arthur of Touch Usability (and Usability Dude at Synaptics in California), who has been filling me in about some of the new developments in tactile feedback. The little rant I was having about “before the act” tactile feedback is actually something that researchers in the field are very aware of and working on. There’s some really interesting research in the CHI’08 paper shown below, which is written by a Glasgow University research group (Hogaan, Brewster & Johnston). Check out page 3 where they talk about “tactons” (tactile icons) and fingertip-over, -click and -slip events. Kevin has pointed out that this approach can’t really be bolted on to the iPhone keyboard UI given the predictive text / hit area adjustment technique it uses. Interesting stuff.