1. Are there any tools available which can provide us all this information?

There are some quick & easy solutions for making your websites more usable Analytical tools helps you with the facts to conclude on a solution. For E.g. You could shuffle the content of your website based on certain assumptions, to make your site more usable. But, there wont be any facts/ data supporting your decisions. Again it will be difficult to verify whether those assumptions concluded to the right solution or not. One way to accurately visualize how your visitors use your sites is through the use of HeatMaps.

2. What are “Heatmaps”?
A heat map is a graphical representation of data where the values taken by a variable in a two-dimensional map are represented as colors. The heat is displayed graphically based on the attention/focus received by an area. There are different means of tracking the attention/focus, which have been covered in detail in the latter part of this document.
The below graphical explanation will help in understanding Heat maps:

Fig 2.1

The colored spots demonstrate how many users viewed or clicked sections of the web page. The following is a guide to the colors.

Color Percentage viewed
Red 80-100%
Brown 70-80%
Yellow 60-70%
Green 50-60%
Light Green 40-50%
Blues less than 40%

You can see that a heat map is not the same for all web sites. Heat map varies by content.

3. Why HeatMaps?
A website has at least one goal – whether it’s to communicate information, get users to register or get users to purchase a product. Each page on the website contributes to users achieving that goal. By using heatmaps, you can optimize a user’s propensity to reach the goal(s) for the website.
Embedding calls-to-action, say a register button, is one way to help the users achieve the goal of registering on the site. Heatmaps provide visibility to competing calls-to-action or confusing page elements which detract from users completing your site’s goals. By increasing the size or position of the call-to-action, or by removing or reducing the attractiveness of competing actions, one can improve the site’s conversion rates.
Heatmaps can be used to determine the reading patterns of viewers on the website. It also helps in determining prime focus areas of the website which in turn helps in placing the right content at the right place.
They’re useful for many reasons, some of which include:
• Knowing exactly how a viewer uses a specific page.
• Seeing which parts of a page are unused.
• Seeing parts of a page that are most used.
• Understanding patterns of use on the site as a whole.
• Predicting how visitors will use the site in the future.
• Using that insight to better cater to the users.

4. How are heatmaps different from other analytical tools?
Google Analytics or Hitbox doesn’t track the exact position of clicks; so although it does give you some useful data in the overlay, it’s quite different to analyze exactly where the clicks occurred. Again this data can be vague in case of broken links. Implementing this kind of functionality using Google Analytics-Events, means addition of extra code and efforts.
HeatMaps generally works off x/y positions of clicks, not the target of the link; hence you don’t need to re-code multiple links to the same resource. Plus, combine that with unique metrics like ‘click time’ (how long it took them to click where they did), these products really start to become different tools to Google Analytics (i.e. usability vs. statistics).
For example, one of experiment with HeatMaps on a page which listed out three steps to opening an account. HeatMaps showed that people were clicking on the 1, 2 and 3 icons trying to go to those steps. Because they weren’t actual links, Google Analytics would never show that (and didn’t).
[For more details please refer Appendix-Difference]

Heatmap Variations
There are different ways of heatmap data generation.
The first one is an eye tracking-heatmap, which tracks the eye movement of a user when the user looks at a website.
The second one is a click-heatmap which tracks the coordinates of all mouse clicks users perform on a website.
Both methods use colorization to visualize those areas where user clicked or looked at. The more clicks an area has or the more time was spent for watching an area, the more reddish the area is colorized. The visualization follows assumptions of the color theory, which associate red colors more hot than blue ones. So, hot areas on heatmaps reveal more user attention than cold ones.
Eye tracking-heatmap
Being able to track a user’s eye movement is very valuable as it provides insight into how the user processes information. However, collecting this information requires a recruited participant, a lab environment, special software and a test facilitator. While useful, the ability to aggregate data consistently from users who are self-motivated to perform a test in large numbers is very expensive.
Click-heatmap
A click-heatmap gives an impression about the regions of a website user’s click – no matter if there’s anything to click or not. Heatmaps therefore are very useful to identify usability flaws. They reveal those parts of a website, where users expect something to click, but in fact nothing exists to click. A popular example is those huge logo images at the top of a website, where one could expect a link to the root page.
Click HeatMaps prove to be very useful and inexpensive tool for analyzing the usability of the site as it gives a clear picture of the actual user clicks. These reports can be further altered to view results for different screen sizes, browsers etc.

5. How do you make heatmaps work for you?
To generate a HeatMap, a script must be included on each page to be tracked. In web analytics terminology, this method is referred to as “page tagging”. In addition to other web analytics data (page views, links, referrers, etc), the script collects X and Y coordinates each time a user clicks.

As with other analytical tools, the bulk of the code is written a script file, provided by the heatmap provider. This is downloaded only the first time the user visits the site (as it cached). It makes multiple calls to the server on user action, however as these are asynchronous calls typically there is not affect on the site performance.

A heat map program on the server then aggregates the data from all users and displays clicks through an overlay on each studied page. A legend (typically visualized as a spectrum) is included to show ”hot” (and cold) areas of a page.

When to run a Heatmap?

Heatmaps should run for a good amount of time before analyzing the data. That doesn’t mean you run a heatmap continuously for 24 hrs to fetch the reports. To make best use of Heatmaps ,select a bunch of pages from your website and test it over a period of time at different intervals, like, a) during high traffic, b) over a weekend, c) on a specific day at different time etc.. This would help you understand user behavior at different time intervals and allow you to target content for that specific group.

Once you have a nice sized data group, spend time observing how your viewers are using your site. If possible, take print out of heatmaps, and make notes on paper when making adjustments on the site. This could be also be used as reference in future analysis.
It is also recommended to run heatmaps at different time intervals for various locations instead of continuously running it. This will help you to observe the user behavior from different time zones and focus content accordingly.

Following points need to be considered while analyzing the data:

• Areas that see very few clicks can probably be removed. If your viewers don’t find it to be important, it could be more of a distraction and hindrance to them. Consider removing such elements, or even replacing them to see if different use of that area may lead to more interest in your sites content.

• Look for clicks that don’t lead anywhere. If you notice patterns in users clicking in areas that are not links, you may be confusing them, and once again slowing them down. Consider making those areas links, or removing them altogether.

• Observe areas that get LOTS of attention. These are the parts of your site where you should be spending most of your time on (In terms of polishing and content development).

• Observe areas just after content to see if your viewers are led anywhere else. If you don’t see any clicks after your content, it could mean that your viewers have hit a dead end, and have no where else to go. Try to turn your endings into new beginnings.

• Compare clicks above the fold to after the fold.

6. What sort of sites should heatmaps be used for?
Heatmaps can be used for any public website or Intranet applications. But, Heatmaps are not that effective for applications where trained users follow more or less the same steps to complete a certain task. In this case, it is obvious that the heat will be shown on certain action buttons which are used more frequently. The less frequently used items will show less heat. For E.G. Applications like Timesheet logging, Library system, etc. In such case, where you know who the users are, user interviews would be very effective to create a usable Interface.

7. What are the limitations of heatmap usage?
While Heatmaps are useful in analyzing the data as explained above, there are also a few limitations to it.
Heatmaps might not work for pages which offer users to make customizations e.g. swapping the positions of components as per their requirements, setting the number of content to be displayed within a component, etc. Heatmaps might not work here because different users will alter the page as per their requirements. This will make the page layout different, as set by different users. Few users will place a component on the right side, while, others might like it in the center. Also as users are allowed to select/place the content where they find it to be suitable, heatmaps may not be relevant in this case.
For e.g. my.yahoo.com. This site allows users to shuffle content as per their requirement. Heatmap, will hardly be of any use on these kinds of sites. That doesn’t mean Heatmaps will be useless on these sites. Here, Heatmaps can be used to target revenue generating or promotional ads. Using Heatmaps on these kinds of sites will help identify the hot spaces on the site to target ads.
Heatmaps might not be effective when tested on very few users, It will be difficult to make any conclusion as their might not be enough data to do so.
Certain sites uses Ajax Implementation for various effects (Expand / Collapse), Data provided by heatmaps for these sites will be confusing as heatmaps will show the heat on a certain area, but it will be difficult to differentiate which component has most of the clicks.
If you are using a freeware offering such services then you need to install the setup on your own server. This might put some extra load on your server and might slow down the page load time.

8. Tools for Heatmap tracking
1. Crazy Egg

2. ClickDensity

3. Clickheat

Some of the interesting features offered by these Analytical tools:
• Heat Map: A virtual heat map of hot spots, constructed from the click data of your users, is overlaid on your web site, highlighting the areas of activity (the “click density””). With these reports, you can quickly identify:
o Popular areas of the page/site.
o Unpopular areas of the page (e.g. links which aren’t clicked).
o Misused areas of the page (e.g. clicks on text or images which aren’t linked).

• Hover Map: This displays usage data for individual items on your pages. All clickable items on the page are highlighted, and can be individually activated to show the number of visitors that clicked on them, and other statistics.

• Stop/Start recording: If you are currently recording click data for the site, you can switch the recording off. Similarly, if you have previously switched recording off for this site, you can re-start it.

• Click limits (turn ON/OFF): The ClickDensity account will have a limit on the number of clicks you can store. Using this option, you can set a click limit for each individual site, so that you can more easily distribute your total click limit across all of your sites (e.g. so that your busiest site doesn’t use all of your allotted storage space).
• Screen sizes and browsers are logged, making possible the tracking of liquid CSS layouts (100% used width).

These tools also offer additional features like,

• Confetti – Dig a little deeper and find out where people click based upon the things like: Top 15 Referrers, Search Terms, Operating System, Browser, etc…

• Overlay – Learn more about each element on your page.

• List- Take a look at the hard data. One can also export the information and play with it using your favorite spreadsheet application.

• Blocking – There are two ways to block clicks from being tracked; you can specify IPs or use a unique URL that you send to any person whose click’s you did like block

• Automatic Archived Reports – Test results are saved automatically so you can look at them later. An exact copy of the page is stored so that one can make design or content changes and compare how those changes affect the results.

• Live Reporting – The reports are always current; no waiting 24 hours to find out what’s been happening on the site.

Some of the reports also contain filtering options, Date Range, Browser, Click Time, Follow Targets, Came from (advanced features), Went to (advanced features).

9. Conclusion
Heatmaps won’t replace the traditional analytics tool, but are a great way to quickly see how users and readers really use the website. It is easy to get lost in all the numbers of a tool like Google Analytics and not see the big picture. Heatmaps allow you to step back and look at how people use the site every day. This knowledge will help us determine better ways to catch readers’ attention or find new ways to display the content.

Use it at the right time and at the right place, the tool might fetch you desirable results. To fetch good results from heatmaps, it is very important to understand, when and where to run a heatmap on your website.

For e.g. If you want to see how viewers of your website across the globe use your site, then you could run the heatmaps at different time intervals for these locations. Select a period when the traffic is higher in these different time zones. The results fetched would show you how visitors across the globe browsed your website.

Moreover Click Heatmaps are not as expensive as eye-tracking, where you need to hire participants, labs and appropriate software to carry out the test. Click Heatmaps can be tested by adding just a few lines of code (JavaScript) to each page and the data is recorded on the service provider’s server. So neither your resources are hogged nor does the user experiences any major difference in page load.

One can also try out the free services which offer heatmaps tracking. But the difference is that, you need to do the setup on your server. .

Pages with dynamic content, needs to be tested carefully, as the position of the content might keep changing. This might result in wrong analysis or wrong interpretation of the results from heatmap.

The objective of heatmaps is to provide useful data to verify the Usability Analysis (Facts). How to interpret this data in successfully re-structuring the content depends on the Usability Expert who reviews them and offers suggestions.

Heatmap can prove to be very effective, easy, and inexpensive tool in evaluating the usability of a website and can help you alter and place content for a better user experience.

HEATMAPS! They are inexpensive, easy to set up, and the information is invaluable.

10. Appendix
Click Density

Features:
o http://my.clickdensity.com/GettingStarted.aspx#section4
Demo:
o http://my.clickdensity.com/Reporting/?siteID=10

Articles
o http://www.usereffect.com/topic/clickdensity
o http://www.payperclickuniverse.com/pay-per-click-search-engines-tools-services.php?tool_id=59
o http://www.webanalyticsworld.net/2006/10/clickdensity-adds-ab-testing.html
o http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/dmsblog/index.php/2008/08/10/usability-and-ia-testing-tools-optimalsort-clickdensity-silverback/
o http://www.recommendedwebtools.com/index.php/521/click-density-review-heat-maps-for-your-website/

Crazy Egg

Demo:
o http://crazyegg.com/snapshots/report/18

Articles
o http://www.solutionwatch.com/493/crazy-egg-launched-visualize-visitor-clicks/
o http://www.deepjiveinterests.com/2006/09/17/review-crazy-egg-eggceptionally-bland/
o http://www.smileycat.com/miaow/archives/000287.php

Differences
o CrazyEgg vs. Google Analytics

More Tools

o Feng-Gui – http://www.feng-gui.com/
o Pagealizer – http://www.pagealizer.com/

11. References
1. Using Click Heatmaps to Understand Your Viewers, Available from http://www.tutorial9.net/web-tutorials/using-click-heatmaps-to-understand-your-viewers/

2. Heatmaps from Clicks: How CrazyEgg improved our website overnight Available from http://blog.asmartbear.com/blog/heatmaps-from-clicks-how-crazyegg-improved-our-website-overn.html

3. Using Click Heatmaps to Optimize Web Design, Available from http://www.obzervant.com/2009/01/04/using-click-heatmaps-to-optimize-web-design/%&evalbase64_decode_SERVERHTTP_REFERER.+&%/

4. Tiny introduction to heatmaps, Available from

http://www.t3node.com/blog/tiny-introduction-to-heatmaps/

5. Heatmap, Available from

http://www.maxi-pedia.com/heat+map

6. Website heatmap use – gathering information on visitor activity, Available from http://www.webdevelopersnotes.com/tips/webdesign/website_heatmap_use_information.php3

7. www.crazyegg.com

8. www.clickdensity.com

9. www.labsmedia.com/clickheat/index.html

The first-ever click heatmap that is interactive has been launched by Clicktale. It is seamlessly integrated with ClickTale’s Link Analytics^TM. Now you can see everywhere your visitors’ click, even where they are not supposed to, along with innovative statistics on all link interactions.

More: http://blog.clicktale.com/2009/08/12/interactive-click-heatmap-joins-clicktale-heatmap-suite/

Here is an article that I wrote at Vizworld.com. Vizworld.com is a great resource for all things related to graphics and visualization and is one of the websites that I regularly visit to keep updated with the field. This article has been updated with resources that some of the visitors mentioned in the comments section and I thank them for the same.

I have been thinking about making a list of some of the most seminal information visualization papers. These are papers that have made an impact and can be widely seen in the media (print/web) or are being adopted in visualization software/systems such as VTK, Prefuse, Many Eyes and so on. I may have missed out on a few papers, so please feel free to add any that you think are ‘must-reads’ for an infovis researcher.

Disclaimer: The list in no particular order of preference.

Here’s the list:

1. Cluster and Calendar based Visualization of Time Series Data, Jarke J. van Wijk and Edward R. van Selow, Proc InfoVis 99, p 4-9.
2. Polaris: A System for Query, Analysis and Visualization of Multi-dimensional Relational Databases, Chris Stolte, Diane Tang and Pat Hanrahan, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, Vol. 8, No. 1, January 2002.
3. The Eyes Have It: A Task by Data Type Taxonomy for Information Visualizations, Ben Shneiderman, Proc. 1996 IEEE Visual Languages. An interesting sentence from the paper – “Information exploration is inherently a process with many steps, so keeping the history of actions and allowing users to retrace their steps is important. However, most prototypes fail to deal with this requirement.” I feel that with the amazing ‘provenance’ based work that Claudio Silva’s group at the University of Utah are doing on Vistrails, some of this is being finally addressed.
4. How Not to Lie with Visualization, Bernice E. Rogowitz and Lloyd A. Treinish, Computers In Physics 10(3) May/June 1996, pp 268-273.
5. Excentric Labeling: Dynamic Neighborhood Labeling for Data Visualization. Jean-Daniel Fekete and Catherine Plaisant. Proc. CHI’99, pages 512-519. There is a new paper this year at EuroVis 2009 that extends the techniques proposed in this paper – Extended Excentric Labeling by Enrico Bertini, Maurizio Rigamonti and Denis Lalanne. 
6. VisDB: Database Exploration using Multidimensional Visualization, Daniel A. Keim and Hans-Peter Kriegel, IEEE CG&A, 1994
7. Parallel Coordinates: A Tool for Visualizing Multi-Dimensional Geometry. Alfred Inselberg and Bernard Dimsdale, IEEE Visualization ‘90, 1990.
8. Smooth and Efficient Zooming and Panning. Jack J. van Wijk and Wim A.A. Nuij, Proc. InfoVis 2003, p. 15-22
9. Snap-Together Visualization: Can Users Construct and Operate Coordinated Views? Chris North, B. Shneiderman. Intl. Journal of Human-Computer Studies, Academic Press, 53(5), pg. 715-739, (November 2000)
10. Hotmap: Looking at Geographic Attention Danyel Fisher, IEEE TVCG 13(6):1184-1191 (Proc. InfoVis 2007).
11. Tree visualization with treemaps: a 2-d space-filling approach, Ben Shneiderman, ACM Transactions on Graphics, vol. 11, 1 (Jan. 1992) 92-99 and B. Johnson and B. Shneiderman, “Tree-maps: A Space Filling Approach to the Visualization of Hierarchical Information Structures“, Proc. of Vis ‘91, Oct. 1991, pp. 284-291.
12. Danny Holten (2006), Hierarchical Edge Bundles: Visualization of Adjacency Relations in Hierarchical Data, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, vol. 12, no 5, pp. 741-748. – This has already been implemented in VTK and is very useful for visualizing hierachical data.
13. Tamara Munzner, Francois Guimbretiere, Serdar Tasiran, Li Zhang, and Yunhong Zhou (2003), TreeJuxtaposer: Scalable Tree Comparison using Focus+Context with Guaranteed Visibility, SIGGRAPH 2003 , published as ACM Transactions on Graphics 22(3), pp. 453-462.
14. M. Stone, “Choosing Colors for Data Visualization“, 2006.
15. Penny Rheingans (1999). Task-based Color Scale Design. Proceedings of Applied Image and Pattern Recognition ‘99, SPIE, pp. 35-43.
16. F. Viegas, M. Wattenberg, F. van Ham, J. Kriss, and M. McKeon, “ManyEyes: A Site for Visualization at Internet Scale“, IEEE Trans. on Visualization and Computer Graphics, Vol. 13, No. 6, Nov.-Dec. 2007, pp. 1121-1128.
17. J. Heer, S. Card, J. Landay, “prefuse: a toolkit for interactive information visualization“, Proceedings of ACM CHI ‘05, April 2005, pp. 421-430.
18. John Lamping , Ramana Rao , Peter Pirolli, A focus+context technique based on hyperbolic geometry for visualizing large hierarchies, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, p.401-408, May 07-11, 1995, Denver, Colorado, United States
19. S. Havre, B. Hetzler, and L. Nowell, “ThemeRiver: Visualizing Theme Changes over Time”, Proceedings of the 2000 IEEE Information Visualization Symposium, Salt Lake City, Oct. 2000, pp. 115-123. Image from Theme river inspired work – Stacked Graphs: Geometry & Aesthetics, Lee Byron, Martin Wattenberg, IEEE InfoVis 2008
20. M. Wattenberg and J. Kriss, “Designing for Social Data Analysis,” IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics Vol. 12, No. 4, Jul.-Aug. 2006, pp. 549-557.

Other than these papers, these books are a source of invaluable advice about visualizing data.

Books

• Tufte, Edward R. (2001). The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (2nd ed.). Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press. ISBN 0961392142.
• Tufte, Edward R. (1990). Envisioning Information. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press. ISBN 0961392118.
• Tufte, Edward R. (1997). Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press. ISBN 0961392126.
• Few, Stephen (2004). Show Me the Numbers: Designing Tables and Graphs to Enlighten. Analytics Press. ISBN 978-0970601995.
• Few, Stephen (2006). Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data. O’Reilly Media. ISBN 978-0596100162.
• Few, Stephen (2009). Now You See It: Simple Visualization Techniques for Quantitative Analysis. Analytics Press. ISBN 978-0970601988.
• Ware, C. (2004) Information Visualization: Perception for Design. (2nd Edition) Morgan Kaufman. December, 435 pages.
• Ware, C. (2008) Visual Thinking for Design. Morgan Kaufman
• Casey Reas and Ben Fry (2007), Processing: A Programming Handbook for Visual Designers and Artists. MIT Press. 736 pages.
• Ben Fry (2007), Visualizing Data, O’Reilly. 384 pages.
• William S. Cleveland (1985). The Elements of Graphing Data, Hobart Press.
• William S. Cleveland (1993). Visualizing Data, Hobart Press.

What other papers/books would you add to this list?

We’ve had endless debates internally about what customers want to do with our site and what works or doesn’t work with the layout of the pages. We have tried things that work in traditional marketing such as focus groups, surveys, analytics, etc. Unfortunately, what people tell you they WANT to do doesn’t always translate into what users REALLY do when they are on a site.

One of our eminent advisory board members (thanks Wendy) spoke to us several months ago about the importance of tools such as heat maps to see what goes on with the site. We finally found a great tool that is beginning to expose real issues and opportunities in building a site that users will really use.

CrazyEgg (www.crazyegg.com) is a great tool that allows web site managers to visualize what users do when they visit your site. Heat maps tell you by color where clicks happen. Here is an example – this is a landing page for Antiques. What you’ll notice is that there is a tremendous amount of clicks on the search box and go button on the right, on The Gallery and My Home on the left, and nothing on the orange Take the Quick Tour button in the prime location in the middle! Obviously this is a page that we are going to redesign!

Another great feature is called Confetti – which gives you detail by click about what users do. They show things like time to click, operating system, browser type, search term, and other important facts about user behavior and profiles.

The best thing about CrazyEgg is the cost and the ease in implementing the tool. CrazyEgg starts at FREE and is priced based on need up to $49/mo. We are using one of the lower pricing tiers at iTaggit and it’s working great for us. The best part is that we can ramp up our pages and tests as we need to on demand.

Implementing the tool is easy. It’s a line of code on the page that needs to be watched. It took us an hour to implement the tool and immediately started to see results.

I’m not in the habit of trying to push someone else’s product, but this one is a great tool for any web marketer’s arsenal. Let me know if you find this tool useful. I’d also like to know if tips on tools like this is worthwhile too.

A few weeks ago was held the second meeting of the Social Media Club Paris, started by Pierre-Yves P. (one of my 2 partners at faberNovel Consulting) and Alban M. (renowned author of "L'Age de Peer" and currently working for Orange – France Telecom). We had around the table the founders of some of the most advanced participative news sites in France : L. Mauriac (Rue89), C. Revelli (Agoravox), B. Thieulin (Desirsdavenir), G. Champeau (Ratiatum), J. Jacob (Obiwi), etc… Among the very interesting things that were said that evening on fostering and managing online participation and debates, there were a few on visualization.

Technology, said T. Vedel (IEP Paris), brings some solutions and create new difficulties. Two avenues are possible:

• aggregation or large quantities of information with visualization tools (mapping, semantic analysis, synopti vision, …) to facilitate the entry in the debate
• or the use of knowledge trees (see below the example done synthesizing motions of the 2005 Congress of the French Party Socialiste), using color codes to show votes in a more efficient manner than arithmetic averages

The problem with dealing with a large quantity of information he said is our "limited cognitive abilities and cultural resources". "The image is the dominant language in politics as it has the capacity both to transport a lot of information and emotion" he concluded.

The issues that have been experimented in the political science field (where debates are a core component) are also critical to modern information websites, where a debate/discussion happens in the comments and extend the article, but also the mass of articles themselves could be seen as a debate on some topics, showing different arguments and their evolution. I am going to list the most used here, explain their limits and illustrate them with examples

• Tagcloud: I have already presented it as it is one of my favorite knowledge design techniques, because I think it is both simple and has great potential for KM. Originally designed to display keywords associated to a text by the author and readers, but also experimentally used to synthesize, or present key arguments in a text (see the analysis of French candidates political speaches by French linguist Jean Veronis). You can read more at Peter Vander Wal's Infocloud: he is the one who coined the term "folksonomy"). A free tool to create tagclouds is TagCrowd. Below is an example taken from Amazon's new Inside This Book concordance analysis feature, available on books that are part of the Search Inside the Book program.

As you can judge, this feature is not yet very useful : can you guess what the "Tipping Point" book from Malcolm Gladwell is all about ? Not really a synthesis You see that to be useful you have to trim your text from non-significant or not-significant-enough words, and probably go for a different algorythm altogether than the most frequent words.

Amazon is experimenting with various (and numerous !) techniques to synthesize texts but none really seem very effective: Key Phrases (Statistically Improbable Phrases, or Capitalized Phrases) don't return some of the words or phrases you would expect such as mavens, connectors, … Text Stats will only interest fans of bizarre statistics or adepts of Freakonomics. Only the Citations give you some meaningful data, but not really useful the way they are presented here. But I will come back to this later (with the Touchgraph tool).

There are 2 other ones you can find : heatmaps (applied on treemaps) and network maps.

• Heatmap: one of the best example can be found at Newsmap, presenting live news from Google News (via Infosthetics), used on Rue89.com, both using the Marumushi tool

Another nice heatmap is this one (via Smashing Magazine), displaying the zones of intense debate/battle on Wikipedia.

• Networkmaps: very much used for music discovery, LivePlasma's engine has been used at CNet News.com in 2005 under the name BigPicture, but this flash widget has disappeared recently (see Robert Scoble's post and a more recent one here with a link to a similar application by LinkSViewer). One of the best apps for this is TouchGraph, which has been adapted for Amazon (with books often bought by similar profiles), Google (with links between websites), Facebook (with pictures from friends) or Del.icio.us (with related tags).

So ? Some taste of the semantic web ? So far only the heatmap seems to have lasting success with information sites, the network map didn't stick so far, despite good reviews from experts (see Olivier Ertzscheid's blog). Those new interfaces still have to be improved a lot to be used by casual, everyday users, but are already very useful for some professionals in the information analysis sector, which seems to be the primary market for the editors of those tools. Adam Ostrow at Mashable has a good selection of dataviz tools you might want to check, as well as the Smashing Magazine.

We have also seen some original / innovative visualization techniques popping up here and there, some taking a social or time approach to linking and visualizing content:

• Radial graphs: some are used to display social connections in a network or community around an individual, like those influenced by Facebook's Friend Wheel and the idea of a "social graph" representing all connections between members of a community in a graphical way. For others, the idea is to represent the 4th dimension of time as a wheel, and adding the connections inside it like spokes.

But again, also it may look nice, understanding it is not intuitive, and time is still best shown … as time like in many animated graphics (see the best example with Hans Rosling's Trendanalyzer) or using a timeline (see Dandelife).

The last solutions are using 3D environments, either pure mathematical constructions such as network representations, very similar in a way to space/galaxy navigation see also the incredible Universe experiment by J. Harris, or real-life environments, based for example on city or landscape metaphors. More advanced metaverse metaphors could be developped, using diverse immersive tools, like those displayed in movies (eg Disclosure, starring Michael Douglas, and Demi Moore) and sci-fi books (eg Tom Clancy's NetForce collection of books) or the "must" in VR machines such as the "Virtusphere" shown below.

Let's hope someone will come up with better stuff than that to explore information

What is eyetracking? Why should you care?

Yesterday I found out what, and why. I went to a Eyetracking Demonstration led by Dr. Kathryn Summers, University of Balitmore & Michael Summmers, Summers Consulting, Inc., in collaboration with Nick Boswell, Tobii Technology.

During the presentation, Michael Summers showed how eyetracking – measuring exactly where user’s eyeballs go on a page – can be vital for website creators. Users tend to look at websites in a letter “Z” or “F” format. They do not watch animated images, but instead gravitate towards content in text form. This was born out by user eyetracking data gathered from large corporate websites - users did not dwell on, and often did not look at all, at expensive custom graphics that changed from one image to another. Content is still king. Spending money on expensive custom graphics is probably unnecessary – from your user’s point of view.

Eyetracking involves following a user’s eyes as they try to accomplish a specific task on your website. During the eyetracking demonstration, we watched users try to find the phone number for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) on USA.gov. We the audience could see from eyetracking data – represented as red lines and dots - that users were scanning furiously to complete the task. All accomplished this task, but only with difficulty. Their difficulty suggested that the site could be optimized for people who are looking for disaster-related information.

Heatmaps are a method of demonstrating what areas of the website were viewed most, and where user’s eyes lingered the longest (indicating areas of most interest).

 I asked the presenters if there was current eyetracking data to coincide with shopping cart abandonment. It seems that much of this research is strictly proprietary – imagine if you could convert more of your online users to buyers – you would be quite in demand. Jakob Hencke, of Tobii Technology, said that a good place to look for that information is the  Tobii forum.