Mouse Tracking UX Conclusions

We've been looking at the benefits and weaknesses of mouse tracking as a form of market research/customer satisfaction/usability. Today, we'll look at some of the additional weaknesses that make mouse tracking not the best tool for collecting data.

Controlling Motivations/Variables Because you're not in control over the research, you're also unable to say with any certainty what or why consumer actions occurred. Large samples will negate some of these problems depending on your research goals, but they're problems nonetheless. Example 1: You have two different visitors.

One is there to waste time during work; the other is there to actually make a purchase. In the end, neither of them end up making a purchase, so their data is looked at equally despite having two separate motivations for coming to the site. Example 2: Cat jumps on keyboard.

Jolts mouse into the wrong area. Data is viewed as user habits when in fact it is annoying cat habits. Example 3: Individual moves mouse, then right after they hover over something important, their significant other comes by.

They kiss, then the user moves right past the important item because they had no intention of stopping there or stalling. Unfortunately, the data believes that the person truly planned to stop over the important item and adjusts it accordingly. The idea is that, over time, the large sample will cancel out some of these errors so that you can better analyze data.

But all errors affect your dataset, and it's hard to know exactly what these errors are or why they've occurred. The Mouse is Not The Eye The mouse won't always move where the eye moves, because the mouse is used for clicking, not for viewing. So while you can find out where your customer's move the mouse, you won't know if they've looked at your logo, or if they're distracted by something ugly on the page, or if they're reading the information they need to read, and so on.

Mouse tracking absolutely has its uses, but those uses are limited. Luckily, it's a cheap and easy tool that can be used by any business that has a website where usability is factor. You shouldn't depend on mouse tracking for conclusions, or even necessarily to draw business decisions, but if you know how to use the data it isn't a bad choice.