December 14, 2013

Review: "Clicktale is a tool that has furthered my career, plain and simple."

Art Zippel, CUA

UX Information Architect

The Word and Brown CompaniesInformation Technology and Services, 1001-5000 employees

Score 9 out of 10

Vetted Review

Verified User

Software Version
Premium

Modules Used
Mouse Tracking Suite

Pros and Cons

Video recordings of users during their entire session to a website. To actually see the cursor, where it goes, does it scroll to the bottom of the page and then back up and then back down where a user finds what they were looking for that they missed the first time. This is invaluable.
Vertical page scroll let's me know how far down a page content is being seen. This coupled with the page recordings gives me the ability to know if the scroll was at a pace that could support comprehension or if they were just flying to the bottom of the page.
Mouse hover heat map gives me an indication of where users are looking. I've caught users thinking non-clickable items were clickable.
Being able to select a page and watch as many users as I want interact with it. I can get a sense of common user patterns in depth for a single page or a flow of several pages.
Page duration versus cursor engagement duration. This was a huge surprise in user behavior for me to learn about that is never duplicated in moderated user testing. If a user opens a link in a new window or tab there is no guarantee that the amount of time the window or tab was open that the user was actively engaged with it's content.

I always felt not providing me with the ability to grant others in my company with rights restricted access was a huge downside. This forced me into being the sole point of contact for anything that had to do with Clicktale.
Hugely lacking in the ability for me to build reports using the quantitative data. It was very labor intensive for me to gather and analyze data from Clicktale.
I missed out in a lot of functionality not having an enterprise level subscription. I had the gold subscription. Many of the things I wanted to capture were not possible without involving their developers - and that was only possible at the enterprise subscription level.

Return on Investment

I learned how effective some of our image carousels were. How only 10% of a page visitors were being exposed to only the first slide. People were scrolling down or leaving the page without ever being exposed to 90% of the content. Once I provided this input to stakeholders it was an easy sell to redesign this aspect of the page.
I used the mouse-move heat map to analyze user interaction with the footer. Showing stakeholders the before and after redesign heat maps did wonders for improving my credibility as an usability analyst.
We used Clicktale to help analyze our 404 error page effectiveness. Our redesign gave us a 14% lower bounce rate on our redesigned 404 error page. Stakeholders appreciated a quantitative measure to gauge the success of that project.

At my former company I was able to upgrade our initial subscription level from bronze to gold without any problems after the first year. Unfortunately, the company I am presently with doesn't have a Clicktale subscription. I would have absolutely no hesitation in strongly recommending Clicktale to my current company if I ever get even a remote chance to do so. Clicktale is used in some of the statistics I use on my resume in an effort to quantify my results as a certified usability analyst. Clicktale has made a significant difference in my value to any team I work with.

Likelihood to Recommend

Clicktale requires a commitment, there is a learning curve. If you don't have analytical-curiosity it can be overwhelming - you have to work it. However, you shouldn't be in user-research if you aren't curious and willing to work for it. You have to take the time to understand the tools and get familiar with what it can and cannot do. Clicktale isn't a magic bullet straight out of the can, and I observed inexperienced researchers making erroneous assumptions with it. Just like any research tool it takes time to learn how and where to apply it or where not to use it as an ideal methodology.

Usability

I had some issues interacting with viewing recordings of a specific page by many users but my impression was that this was going to be fixed.

Usability Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Like to use Relatively simple Easy to use Technical support not required Well integrated Consistent Quick to learn Convenient Feel confident using Familiar	None