Watch your visitors move round your site
Posted by DavidM in Interesting stuff | 29 May 2007
I came across Robot Replay today as a tool to understand how users move around your website. I've used independent user testing and focus groups for work in the past and while very useful they suffer from three major drawbacks - they only include small sample sizes, they cost a packet and users are in a lab environment.
There are a growing number of analytical tools available now and Robot Replay is one that partially overcomes these issues. It can capture information about all your site visitors, it's free (for the basic service) and it's data from real users in a live environment.
Basically it captures the keystrokes and mouse movements of each user and allows you to view them as a movie. The advantage over a normal analytics package is rather than just capturing what someone clicks on, you can also see where they scroll and hover, giving an idea of where they are looking and the time they spend.
I have some concerns about Robot Replay though. They seem to occasionally delete your user history to make space, though this may be more formalised with a premium service. There are privacy and security issues - you can see what users are entering in fields on your site and that information is hosted on the Robot Replay system. Finally, if you have more than a small number of visitors, when are you realistically going to get time to review more than a sample of user movies and how will you collate all their actions into a meaningful overall result?
That said, Robot Replay is a free tool that could give interesting insights. We don't capture personal details other than for posting comments so Martin and I may look at using it. If we do, we'll post a notice letting you know first.