More on Mouse Tracking for UX

In the last article we started looking at some of the benefits of mouse tracking – a data collection method to improve website usability and, ultimately, customer satisfaction. Mouse tracking is a valuable tool for assessing customer habits on your website. Today we'll continue looking at some of the benefits of mouse tracking.

No Extra Variables Mouse tracking goes on completely behind the scenes, so your visitors will have no idea they're the subject of your research, and their movements will not be affected by the research itself. This is a great advantage for your data collection because rarely does the research not have the potential to affect the data. Demographics Finally, mouse tracking demographics are all over the map – literally.

If you engage in mouse tracking, you'll be able to see if visitors from non-English speaking countries, or visitors from any specific area of the world, or visitors of any demographics group that you can see with your data, are viewing your site the same way. It's a useful way to test for cultural or other differences, and one that isn't often possible with smaller studies.

If your only goal is to understand mouse movements, mouse tracking has few weaknesses. But that's not the primary goal of mouse tracking. Mouse tracking is usually meant to be a form of customer satisfaction research or market research – viewing how people interact with your site with their mouse and learning what you can change to improve clicks, hits, optimization, branding, and more.

With that in mind, mouse tracking has several weaknesses. Some of these include: No Feedback These visitors are not research subjects, and that can severely limit their value. All you know is where their mouse moved.

You cannot find out why their mouse moved there, what their demographics are, or any other data on what they take away from your website. That can drastically limit the value of the data, at least from a market research standpoint. Without the ability to find out who the user is, why they're visiting, etc., you cannot necessarily learn much about them or how they interacted with your website.

We will take a look at some additional weaknesses of the mouse tracking method in the next article, and then close with some final thoughts.