For startups paying for user testing is often infeasible on a large scale, however we found In-Page analytics can prove just as (if not more) valuable in understanding the user experience.
We initially tried out three products Userfly, ClickDensity and Mouseflow as they all have reasonable pricing and offer free-trials. ClickTale and CrazyEgg also operate in this space but we chose not to try either of them (ClickTale is expensive; CrazyEgg doesn't offer a free-trial).
Adding any of these products to a website is fairly trivial, like with Google Analytics you just have to drop some javascript code into the pages you want to track.
We ended up settling with Mouseflow which offered three type of analytics we found useful:
- User recording
- Click heatmaps
- Viewpoint maps
The first two proved critical, watching user recordings and analysing the heatmaps pointed out key flaws in our design.
In particular:
- Users looking at the job listings were clicking on the row containing the job (which wasn't a link) rather than the job title itself (which was the appropriate link).
- Users on specific skill pages (such as the Perl jobs page) often scrolled through the jobs and afterward seemed lost with the mouse hovering all over the place. Watching the user recordings made it obvious they were looking for a way to get back to the main page and couldn't find a way to do it.
By simply making the rows clickable and adding a clearer link back to the main page from skill pages (total time to make these changes and deploy was less than an hour) we reduced our bounce rate by 30%. As the majority of our traffic (at the moment) comes from paid adverts this makes a huge difference.
As a result of watching user recordings we also noticed that users looked at jobs belonging to the same industry. A user was more likely to view two completely unrelated jobs in the same industry than similar jobs across different industries. So we added industry classification to jobs. Our game developer jobs page is now more popular than any of our language specific pages.
The viewpoint analytics offered by Mouseflow came as a bonus, they meant we started thinking about design in ways that didn't even occur to us before hand.
On our main page there's a huge drop off of users as we go down the page. Most users only look at the top of the page and at the first few job listings (looking at our Google Analytics confirmed this held for click-throughs as well; jobs at the top of the list received more views than jobs at the bottom). Interestingly the same behaviour isn't visible on the skill specific pages, users seem much happier to scroll and there's almost no drop-off as we go down a page. It seems that while the job listings are holding the user's interest they're willing to keep scrolling down.
So next up on our todo list is figuring out how to redesign our pages using this information to increase visibility of all the jobs we list.
Going forward monitoring In-Page analytics is going to be as important to us as tracking traditional website analytics.