Jason Butcher

Recently we’ve been expanding our service range to include a lot more in the way of conversion rate optimisation and usability testing, as part of this we spent a lot of time investigating various tools that allow us to conduct usability tests without the expense of panel testing.

One of the tools we’ve started to use is ClickTale which (rather amazingly) produces a video of how your visitors browse through the website including mouse movement, mouse clicks, scrolling, data entry in forms and pretty much everything they do in a particular session.

It’s amazing how much a website can be improved just by watching people browse through the different pages and analysing how they interact with forms. For those of you concerned about privacy implications it’s worth noting that you can only read text entered in web forms if the visitor actually submits the form, otherwise it’s shown as a series of dots like a password field.

Another great feature of ClickTale is the form analytics which shows the fields that are causing problems in your forms. For example we found forms with particular fields that were always causing users to abandon the form and disappear – removing those fields gave a big increase in the number of users actually completing and submitting the form.

If you’ve had more experience with ClickTale let me know in the comments. The basic account is free so it’s easy to give it a try.

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