Click Maps Do Not Show Where People Look
A study of 36 participants completing 32 search tasks found that where people point the mouse and where they look are related, but the alignment changed with time, behavior, user, and task (Microsoft Research, 2012). The authors questioned the common assumption that gaze is well approximated by the cursor. Mouse and click heat maps are useful, but they are not eye tracking.
What the research observed
The researchers recorded eye movements and cursor movements together while people searched. Cursor and gaze were correlated, but not consistently. How closely they lined up differed from one person to the next, from one task to the next, and over the course of a single task (Microsoft Research, 2012).
Reading is the clearest case of the two coming apart. A visitor can read a paragraph with the cursor sitting idle elsewhere, and a mouse-movement map will show that paragraph as cold.
What it means for a business website
Heat map tools give you clicks, mouse movement, and scroll depth. The rules that follow are practical inferences from this research, not measured results:
- Clicks show intent and action. They do not show what was read.
- No clicks on a section does not mean nobody saw it. Text, prices, and reviews are meant to be read, not clicked.
- Mouse-movement maps approximate gaze only roughly, mostly while someone is actively pointing.
The risk is cutting good content. An owner sees a cold testimonials section on a click map, decides nobody cares, and removes the thing that was building trust.
What to do
- Do not remove or demote a section only because it shows few clicks.
- Check scroll data to see whether visitors reached the section at all.
- Compare outcomes, such as inquiries or sales, before and after any change to that section.
Sources
- Huang, White, Buscher. User See, User Point: Gaze and Cursor Alignment in Web Search. Microsoft Research (CHI 2012), 2012.