Mouseflow - really understand how customers use your website
May 26, 2016
Mouseflow - really understand how customers use your website
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Mouseflow
Currently Mouseflow is used by the digital product team to understand how customers are using our websites. Session recording is used to understand exactly how people are interacting with pages on site, and the heat maps help with understanding which areas of the site are viewed and where users are focusing their attention. These two Mouseflow features are great for quickly boosting understanding of problems users are having without having to immediately resort to more expensive user or lab testing.
- Session recording shows exactly what users are doing on your website. When they scroll, what they click on, when they hesitate - you see the screen as they would see it.
- Heat maps show you where users are clicking, how far down the page they scroll, where their mouse cursors spend most of their time and also which area of the page they dedicate the most attention to.
- Form analytics show you how users are interacting with your forms - which fields they click into, how long they spend in each field and also which fields are causing them to drop out (is it that unneeded phone number field?).
- Helps bolster your standard A/B testing tool so you can understand exactly how usage is differing between two scenarios, and makes it easier to settle disputes amongst colleagues about what will work best.
- Session recording isn't exactly as a user would see it (e.g. it renders the HTML a user sees in your browser, rather than as they saw it). This means you might not see browser specific display quirks.
- Session recording isn't perfect, especially on responsive sites or dynamic pages. Sometimes clicks register in the wrong place and what you see on screen doesn't line up exactly with what a user would have seen, and is more noticeable on mobile devices.
- Form analytics requires a unique ID for each form. I've worked with a couple of CMS systems where this wasn't possible to achieve, so wasn't able to take advantage of this feature in all scenarios.
- Tagging feature is useful, but it would be great if Mouseflow was able to capture all sessions and then only keep those sessions which match the criteria you're searching for (e.g. people encountering a specific error or visiting a particular page). This would make it easier to diagnose more complex, multi-page problems and understand how a user triggers them without using all of your monthly sessions.
- Helped more user sign ups by helping identify problems on registration forms.
- Understanding exactly which content is being viewed so we can understand how to rearrange landing pages for maximum effect.
- Providing an affordable alternative to user testing so we can quickly identify issues in prototypes and get more value from actual lab testing.
Each of these tools has a similar underlying offering. Mouseflow is probably the least mature offering in terms of feature set and reliability, but it is a competitor product that is working hard to work out the engineering kinks. They also have great customer service representative who are willing to listen and are very helpful. You also get a capable tool with a great feature set at a reasonable price - in some cases Mouseflow was just 1/10th of the price. Ultimately with a constrained marketing budget, this tool made sense for us.