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.

With the availability of shopping carts on the internet, most of us now do shopping online. This online shopping may vary from books to cars from few dollars to thousands of dollars. Online shopping has become one of the most convenient ways of purchasing goods with the minimum effort. In this article, lets try to understand how online shopping works in simple terms.

Most of the shopping sites are built top of databases. When customers search for their product in the shopping site, they are actually searching through a set of database records. This search query can be simple or complex, based on the consumers buying requirements.

After the database returns the query results to the end user through the web page, end user usually pay using a credit card or a third-party paying mechanism such as PayPal. In the process of filling online forms for buying goods, end users are directed to a secure connection secured with SSL (Secure Socket Layer) for entering billing information such as credit card details. This is to ensure hackers or attackers don’t get in to sensitive information.

After the consumers are in the secured area, they fill out the form and submit it to the website. Then this information is sent to the web application through the secured connection to the web site’s transaction server. The end users  don’t have be worried about sensitive information being transferred over the wires as they are encrypted and no one else other than the website can read it.

Then the transaction server receives the encrypted information and the information will be decrypted. Thereafter, based on the billing information provided such as credit card information, transaction server verifies the validity of payment by connecting to a payment gateway of the credit card company or the financial institute.

If the transaction server receives a positive response from the credit card company or the financial institute, then it refreshes the web pages and displays the page that the consumers can print out to confirm their order. This is an online invoice. Most of the online shopping sites will send the consumer an email following the online purchase displaying the purchase information.

Then the transaction server sends out the order to the warehouse so the warehouse can dispatch the order to the consumer via the preferred method of transporting.