Why Are You Here?

Heatmap

Over the past month or so I’ve been watching you. Yes, you. Well, it’s been longer than that, but it’s been about a month since I’ve been using Crazy Egg to monitor usage of this site. I’ve used both Mint and Google Analytics before to get some basic usage information, but nothing quite as clear as the heat map produced from Crazy Egg (see above).

Why am I gathering data? Well, I’m a bit of an information junkie. It’s not like this site is profitable to me in any way, but I like to know that my little slice of the Web is at least a little bit useful to the people that choose to type in www’s and .com’s surrounding my name. Before you freak out over privacy, just look at how much information I share about my life, and compare it to the meager info I know about you - mouse clicks, IP addresses, and referral addresses. It’s more persona-based information than personal.

So what have I learned from the results?

You want to know who I am, what I do, and what I can do.
The Contact and Resume pages saw a lot of hits, and many people tried to click on my (unclickable - sorry for the tease) picture to get a better look at me. I suppose that’s flattering.

You want to see my pretty pictures.
The Flickr thumbnails along the side saw lots of clicks, as did the Photography link (which also takes you to my Flickr page). Many also tried to click my (mostly unclickable) headline photos, like the one at the top of this post. Again, sorry to tease you there.

You don’t care about my archives.
Or, at least, you don’t care to flip through them month by month (I don’t blame you); The search box saw a lot of hits, and I hope it works, since I didn’t write the code that drives it.

You’re a little shy.
Lots of posts had the comment button clicked on, yet no comments came my way. No need to be bashful; We don’t judge here.

Overall, it’s not really surprising that most people seem to be coming to my personal site because they want to know more about me. I’m getting an annoyingly high amount of Google Images referrals, which I suspect, based on the search terms, are from people hoping to rip off the image they find for a presentation, piece of work, or paper. Stop that. (I tried to block Google Images using a robots.txt but it hasn’t appeared to have done anything).

Other than that, there’s a whole lot of name searches. People trying to find out more about me - I’ve seen to-be employers, clients, and friends come in this way. It’s really kind of shocking how many, really. Heat maps seem to be a really great way to gather generalized data about user behaviour. I wish I could easily generate them in some of the usability testing I do!

November 7, 2007 | Filed Under Writing