In the last article we had a look at Clickheat, a usability analysis tool. In this article, we’ll be looking at few other similar tools that can be used for tracking and analyzing user behaviors.

Bobby

This is an initiative taken by CAST for making World Wide Web more accessible to individuals with disabilities. This project has been in the industry for a decade and has helped both novice and professional web designers analyze and make improvements of their web sites. For the service this project has introduced, it has won number of awards from different bodies. From 2004, Watchfire sponsors the project as it was sold by CAST.

Due to the comprehensive accessibility coverage of Bobby, IBM has included this software in to IBM Rational Policy Tester Accessibility Edition and available widely from IBM.

ErgoLight

ErgoLight WebTester is a usability testing software which is focused on human factors. It emphasizes on user friendliness, usability and user reliability. On Dec 31, 1999, PC-Media wrote:

“Not all software developers can afford to use the services of usability labs. This is especially true for small software companies. The new products of ErgoLight Ltd. change the rules of this game. By tracking the details of site navigation on a central server and by intervention, WebTester provides the capability of usability validation to everybody.”

AWStats

AWStats is a free log file analyzer for famous web servers. Although this is not a full scale usability testing tool, this gives many information about user behaviors and application responses. This easy to install tool runs on Linux and can read log files of all famous web servers including Apache. You may have to tweak the logging format of the web server in the configuration files.

AWStats gives detailed information about the page hits, visiting IPs, visiting browsers, most accessed resources and user visiting trend over a period of time. This information can be used for placing valuable information on certain pages where most people do access.

Usability of web applications has been under spotlight for few years as it represents a set of significant qualities of the business application. Improved usability has been identified as a cost saver when it comes to user trainings etc. The business that has a higher attrition rate such as call centers expect their software to have high usability as it cuts down the cost in frequent user training.

In this article we focus on few tools used for tracking user behaviors for usability implementation. If the application to have higher usability, first of all the designers and the developers of the software should know the exact user behaviors. These sophisticated tools help designers and developers to monitor the user behaviors closely and accurately.

Clickheat

Clickheat monitors specific web pages of web applications and track where the users click. After monitoring user clicks for over a period of time, it generates a heat map indicating the click density of the page. This allows the application designers and developers to identify the main areas accessed by the users and perform the optimization for the web page. This information is vital for identifying the places for placing advertisements, important links etc.

Installation of Clickheat is quite easy. You can install Clickheat on a Linux PC and then you need to custom generate a JavaScript code which is about four lines for the web page you are intended to monitor. Placing the JavaScript code at the bottom of the HTML page completes the job and Clickheat starts recording every click on the webpage from there onwards. Eventually, Clickheat generates heat maps for different screen resolutions and time frames. Clickheat is free and open source software and installed on either Windows or Linux. It supports Mozilla Firefox 2, Mozilla Firefox 3, Internet Explorer 6 and 7.