Here is my interview with Dan Zambonini of Box UK - The web agency behind Clickdensity
What’s your role at clickdensity?
I’m Technical Director of Box UK, the web agency behind clickdensity. I oversee the technical aspects of the product, help to design and prioritise new features, and communicate with the development, operations and marketing side of things, to ensure everything runs smoothly together. I’m basically the Product Manager.
What is your elevator pitch for clickdensity?
clickdensity is an integrated suite of next-generation Usability tools, that help you make a better, more profitable website. It offers real, meaningful insights into the trends and patterns of your website visitors, at an extremely low cost. And it gets more features by the month.
How long has clickdensity been online?
The service went live in June 2006 after a beta testing period, although it had a web presence a few months before that. So we’ve had about 6 months of providing ‘live’ service now.
Was clickdensity the first company to create a “heatmap application” and if so where did you get the idea of such a concept?
clickdensity was the first live heat-map service to be launched. We’re pretty sure that when we first started creating heat-maps of website clicks (November 2005), no-one else was doing it.
We got the idea back in early November 2005, when we were working in partnership with a Usability consultancy. We were working on optimising an insurance application form for a multi-national bank, and the usability consultants were talking about the results from their usability workshops.
As they talked about the process of how they analysed the videos of people using the websites, it became clear to me that there was some obvious (automatic) data not being analysed, which had to be painstakingly examined by eye. The consultants were watching where people were clicking on each page (not actually on links, but on specific form fields within a form), and it occurred to me that this kind of data could very easily be collected and visualised.
We created a simple prototype system (using PHP), and initially just deployed it onto some of our existing customers’ websites, purely out of interest (I eventually blogged about some of these results (here)
It became apparent very quickly that more and more people were interested in seeing similar data/reports for their websites, so we then decided to ‘productize’ it, into something that was very easy for people to install and run on their own websites; hence clickdensity as you see it today.
We went through a few iterations of architecture and technology (from PHP to Ruby, then finally to .NET) during this process, to ensure that our final product offered the best performance and flexibility in the long-term.
There are a couple of other similar websites online. Does clickdensity have any unique features?
There used to just be two main contenders (clickdensity and crazyegg), but in the last month or two, we’ve seen at least four or five new competitors come on to the market. Of course, we keep a careful eye on the features that each service offers (in fact, we track feature-sets using http://competitio.us/, a pretty handy tool).
With that in mind, I can confidently tell you that we have many, many unique features in this area! In fact, I’m surprised by how basic many of the latest offerings are; I certainly wouldn’t look to enter an existing market unless I could offer something new or different.
I’ll run you through some of the obvious features that we have, that you won’t find in most (if any) of the competition:
- Dynamic filtering of reports. This seems like an obvious one to me, but so many of the competing sites just produce ‘static’ heat maps, that you can’t filter (by browser, screen resolution, date range, etc).
- Task Completion analysis. You can filter reports by ‘Came From’ a specific URL, and/or ‘Went To’ a specific URL, so you can see (for example) only the clicks of people who eventually went on to purchase something on your website.
- Dynamic page support. Most of the competitors take a ‘screen-shot’ of your website when you start recording clicks, which means any changes you make to your website cause problems. All our reports are shown overlaid on your actual site, and you can use the ‘Follow Targets’ feature to ensure that clicks track parts of the page, even if they move.
- A completely unique, accessible, integrated A/B Testing suite. You really have to try this out – we’ve been amazed by the results! It lets you very easily try changes to individual items on your page (an image, link, or heading, for example), and analyze what difference this makes to click-throughs, etc.
- IP Filtering. So that you can remove any clicks that you (or your organisation) makes.
- Virtual Pages. A bit of a techy one, which I won’t go in to, but basically lets you configure reports so that if a page has a single URL but can display different contents (e.g. a page that either says ‘success’ or ‘failure’), these can be reported on separately.
- Similarly, we’ve got pretty comprehensive support for different types of URLs (with/without query strings, session ids, etc).
- I think we’re the only people to record the ‘text size’ setting that people use, and allow filtering by that.
- Similarly, I think only clickdensity records (and allows segmentation by) ‘click time’ of clicks (i.e. how long it takes – from page load – for visitors to click on something). This allows website owners to discover a bit more detail about their visitor behaviour. For example, a major high-street retailer originally thought that their ‘search’ function was used by a certain type of user, who didn’t even try to browse for items, but went straight into the ‘search’. Using clickdensity ‘click-time’ reports, they then discovered that most people didn’t click into the search box until 30 seconds after page-load, suggesting that most ‘search’ users try to find information on the current page before resorting to a search. This highlighted a problem with their IA and labelling, which has since been fixed.
- Some little niceties that we have: show page folds, exporting to screenshots, automatic PDF receipts, click limits, page level stats, adjustable transparency, HTTPS support, and…. I’ll stop here before your readers get bored!
Are you worried about upcoming competition in this area?
Well, as you can see from my previous list, we’re pretty confident that we have a good head-start!
Having said that - of course we’re worried about upcoming competition. I think every great company is worried about competition, which is what makes them produce consistently brilliant and innovative output.
We certainly aren’t resting on our laurels, which is why you’ll see that we release new features every few weeks.
Can you reveal any “big” clients that currently use clickdensity?
Obviously we have to respect the confidentiality of our customers, so I can’t give you all the names I’d like to! What I can say (given the permission we have been granted) is that we have some extremely large brands using it, ranging from Britvic (owner of Pepsi), through to a world bank and a global supermarket chain. The feedback from these organisations – who are used to paying tens of thousands of dollars for similar results – has been outstanding! It makes us very proud of what we’re doing.
Will we see any more features in the future? Will the site expand?
Oh yes! We’ve pretty much doubled our feature-set in the last 6 months (since launch), and have plenty of ideas and designs for incredible new functionality… Our road-map currently has about a year-and-a-half’s worth of new features on it, and our user base is really good at sending us new suggestions, which is great.
I get the impression that lots of the competitors’ services are ‘side-projects’, which are being developed on an ad-hoc basis in free time. As Box UK is a 30-strong company, with a vast array of experience (including UI and IA design, development, and project management), we’re able to dedicate resources to clickdensity full-time, and develop and manage it efficiently.
I don’t want to give away too much about our new features, but there’s a certain new feature that I’m particularly excited about, called “User Gap Analysis”, which is going to blow your mind! We think it’s going be so revolutionary that it will probably be imitated even more than heat maps…
And finally a personal question. Do you have any favorite blogs you read that you would like to suggest to the community?
Well, of course I first have to recommend my own O’Reilly blog (http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/2379)! The blogs I read daily are pretty well-known; Boing Boing, Martin Fowler, O’Reilly, Techcrunch, Radar, Mashable and (non-work related) Pitchfork. It’s not really a blog, but I’ll also check to see what’s happening on digg every few hours. Oh, and vitamin too.
To Find out more about ClickDensity visit www.clickdenisty.com
Technorati Tags: Clickdensity, Heatmaps, Statistics, Tracking, Interview
Posted November 23, 2006 
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