Hi Matthew – here are the PiratePad comments from the crit.
Nice investigation! So, a heatmap of where people have clicked on a submit button. Nice use of data. Thanks for mentioning the specific discoveries you made — e.g. where people don’t click. Check out this thesis from MIT:, the Patina project: http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~arjan/patina/html/PatThesis995.PDF
The hardcopy printout is really nice. Could you upload the PDF to the blog?
It’s B&H Photo, isn’t it? What a wonderful data source to just happen to have. 🙂 Are you familiar with heatmap products for website optimization like ClickTale? There’s a lot of work in this space, but nothing quite like this. I really like the print-outs, they add some dimension that just isn’t viewable in a purely digital version. Again, blurring the line between research and art – there’s definitely a CHI paper here too to someone looking at this from another angle. Looks great. -SB
Pretty snazzy. I like the hard copies. Is there something else you could do with this though? Maybe include demographic filters. You spoke towards the end that you didn’t think that people tend to click on the middle of the button, and that trends would change depending on the size of the word in the button or if the word is off-center. I think it would be cool to investigate that further too. 🙂 -Amanda
Nice submit buttons!!!
It might be interesting if you made a couple different versions that had dufferent typogography on them, and see how (or if) that influences where people click.
Or you could try making test buttons out of different images–if someone has to click on an image, where will they click? For different contrasting images?
Interesting that this is information that you should not really have access to. If you’re using standard HTML buttons or HTML/CSS this data isn’t available.
>>This happens *way* more than people like to talk about. Google is notorious for doing it for “a small percentage” of users. using some quiet Javascript to poke at how they look at their results – and return back and forth from the engine. -SB
Hi Matthew – here are the PiratePad comments from the crit.
Nice investigation! So, a heatmap of where people have clicked on a submit button. Nice use of data. Thanks for mentioning the specific discoveries you made — e.g. where people don’t click. Check out this thesis from MIT:, the Patina project:
http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~arjan/patina/html/PatThesis995.PDF
The hardcopy printout is really nice. Could you upload the PDF to the blog?
It’s B&H Photo, isn’t it? What a wonderful data source to just happen to have. 🙂 Are you familiar with heatmap products for website optimization like ClickTale? There’s a lot of work in this space, but nothing quite like this. I really like the print-outs, they add some dimension that just isn’t viewable in a purely digital version. Again, blurring the line between research and art – there’s definitely a CHI paper here too to someone looking at this from another angle. Looks great. -SB
Pretty snazzy. I like the hard copies. Is there something else you could do with this though? Maybe include demographic filters. You spoke towards the end that you didn’t think that people tend to click on the middle of the button, and that trends would change depending on the size of the word in the button or if the word is off-center. I think it would be cool to investigate that further too. 🙂 -Amanda
Nice submit buttons!!!
It might be interesting if you made a couple different versions that had dufferent typogography on them, and see how (or if) that influences where people click.
Or you could try making test buttons out of different images–if someone has to click on an image, where will they click? For different contrasting images?
Interesting that this is information that you should not really have access to. If you’re using standard HTML buttons or HTML/CSS this data isn’t available.
>>This happens *way* more than people like to talk about. Google is notorious for doing it for “a small percentage” of users. using some quiet Javascript to poke at how they look at their results – and return back and forth from the engine. -SB