To get more insight into the habits of our users, we had decided to perform some user-tracking.

We wanted to use heat maps because they quickly show what your user is doing on your webpage. After researching the topic for a while, we decided to use Clicktale. It offers heat maps for mouse movement, mouse clicks, the attention that a user gives some elements on the page and even how much the user has to scroll.

It sounded too good to be true, it was: Our application relies heavily on the Google Maps Api. If you look at this screenshot of our website, you can see that more than 90% of the webpage is covered by a giant map.

Clicktale however, does not recognize the map and places all the mouse clicks on the top of the page. The following image is a heatmap of the clicks generated with Clicktale. All the bright colored dots at the top of the page are actually clicks on the map.

So it was back to the drawing board for user tracking. We looked for some alternatives and found a very interesing one: Segment.io.

Segment.io actually combines multiple tracking tools. It also allows us to track in more detail than with clicktale. Specific information about the user (like the user’s id) can also be tracked. This way, we can look at what went wrong for a specific user during our user tests.