Delayed Mouse Tracking - jsFiddle - Online Editor for the Web (JavaScript, MooTools, jQuery, Prototype, YUI, Glow and Dojo, HTML, CSS) 24 Usability Testing Tools. Mouse Tracking is better than Eye Tracking « Open Web Analytics. The good folks over at ClickTake have posted a great piece on how eye tracking compares to mouse tracking in terms of analyzing web page usability. Mouse tracking differs from eye tracking in that a user’s mouse movements are recorded instead of their eye movements as they interact with a web page.
The best way to think about mouse tracking is that it turns your web pages into a one way mirror through which you can literally watch how your users interact with the page. When it comes to usability work, mouse tracking often times is far more effective than eye-tracking because: It can be performed on live users of your site, instead of simulated in a lab.It doesn’t require specialized/expensive labs, recruitment efforts, consultants, or equipmentIf you use Open Web Analytics you can do it for FREE and get started immediately. No waiting. Have you ever debated a design decision with a client or colleague only to wind up agreeing to disagree? Do users ever scroll the web page? John Dyer | Mouse Tracking: Beyond Analytics. The next big thing after website traffic reports appears to be mouse tracking.
There are several services popping up that use JavaScript to track a user's mouse movements and clicks. When you login to the service you can watch movies of exactly how a user explored a webpage using their mouse. This is a much cheaper alternative to a full-blown eyetracking system. Here are some of the major players so far (note all of them have nice real-word names instead of "web 2.0" meaningless madeup names): "Heatmaps" MapSurface.com – Based on his orginal AJAX Link Tracker, Glenn Jones' service overlays graphical click data on top of your site. "Mouse Movements" OpenCube.com – OpenCube has been known for it's nice DHTML/JavaScript/CSS widgets and menus, but it has also developed a product that goes a heatmap and actually tracks the mouse movements of users. "Free" MIT Labs – MIT's Media Lab has released a PHP-based tool that does some pretty powerful mouse tracking.
Dr Dobbs - Mouse Tracking with JavaScript and Perl. JavaScript Example of Mouse Position Tracking.