How we built interactive heatmaps using Solr and Heatmap.js by Chris Becker.
From the post:
One of the things we obsess over at Shutterstock is the customer experience. We’re always aiming to better understand how customers interact with our site in their day to day work. One crucial piece of information we wanted to know was which elements of our site customers were engaging with the most. Although we could get that by running a one-off report, we wanted to be able to dig into that data for different segments of customers based on their language, country, purchase decisions, or a/b test variations they were viewing in various periods of time.
To do this we built an interactive heatmap tool to easily show us where the “hot” and “cold” parts of our pages were — where customers clicked the most, and where they clicked the least. The tool we built overlaid this heatmap on top of the live site, so we could see the site the way users saw it, and understand where most of our customer’s clicks took place. Since customers are viewing our site in many different screen resolutions we wanted the heatmap tool to also account for the dynamic nature of web layouts and show us heatmaps for any size viewport that our site is used in.
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If you are offering a web interface to topic map (or other information services) this is a great way to capture user feedback on your UI.
PS: shutterstock-heatmap-toolkit (GitHub)