Crazy Egg has finally opened its doors to the public after what feels like a long closed beta session. I had the good fortune to unofficially test the product probably 3 or 4 months back now and was impressed by service as a whole though, at the time, performance was less than real time. For those that don’t know, Crazy Egg offers some great usability testing of your site, allowing you to see how people react to different layouts and styles for example. By monitoring people’s interactions with your site, it logs statistics on hotspots that can be displayed on great looking heat maps helping you to analise the usage of your site. Previously this sort of testing and monitoring would consume large resources or be sourced out to independent usablilty specialists but now can be implemented very quickly and easily by dropping in some JavaScript into your (x)html.
Including the obligatory web 2.0 revenue model centred around different subscription plans will keep the investors happy; these range from ‘free’ (5000 visits a month and two pages tracked) up to pro for 250,000 visits and unlimited number of pages tracked. Based on the price plans available, it will be interesting to see how popular this service will becomes and / or how soon one of the big search engines eats them up. My personal gut feeling is that Google will probably be prime suitors and snap them up to integrate them into their existing stats services like Google Analytics and Measure Map.
Combined with a first class statistics package like Mint, I firmly believe this sort of usability testing will become as valuable to site owners / designers as SEO in the future if it isn’t already now. Take a look at Crazy Egg and see for yourself, it can show up some surprising results!
I’m impressed with your description of the product. I think I should try it…