Show HN: Requesting feedback on my side-project chatteranalytics.com | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Requesting feedback on my side-project chatteranalytics.com

chatteranalytics.com

49 pointsjrallison33 comments

I built this out of a desire for a simple tool to give insights on user interaction/usability without the need to define and track a ton of custom events for basic web interactions.

I started with a basic real-time stream of common events, used it in a few projects, and gained some valuable information from it.

If there's enough interest for this type of tool, I'll build it out and launch it.

The long term vision is to visualize individual user sessions.

Thanks!

Can you share what technologies you're using?

Sure, Node.js and Redis to track and store events. The front-end is a small rails app which will manage user accounts, etc.

How much back in time do you store data? 30 days?

Right now, just the live stream. No historic data.

I want to add historic data in the future.

That's a brilliant landing page; demonstrating the tool in-page is all the description anyone needs :)

I agree. Having the demo right on the first page without having to signup or go through some other page is an awesome way to demonstrate the value of the product.

I would recommend detecting if javascipt is enabled on the landing page and putting up an "enable javascript to see how it works on this page" message.

I had javascript off when I got there and didn't realize I was missing something until I read the parent comment.

Also - the service looks useful to someone like me who isn't much of a web designer but has a vanity site and a blog. I should say I am allergic to javascript bloat that slows down load times, so you'd need to keep speed your top priority for me to use it. I used to have adwords on one of my pages but took it off b/c it was the slowest thing on the page.

Re javascript: thanks, will do!

Re page load time: I'm using asynchronous loading of the scripts. This allows the page to load fully, and the JavaScript is loaded in the background.

It's not completely cross browser, but speeds things up for people with modern browsers. There may be a similar approach for adwords, but I wouldn't know for sure.

Please consider changing the background and font combination. The "DISCOVER HOW PEOPLE INTERACT WITH YOUR WEBSITE" is very difficult to read and the light gray on darker gray text on the left is almost just as bad.

I'm using the latest version of Chrome on Windows 7 if that helps.

I appreciate the simplicity of "just paste a small javascript snippet", but for more secure sites I'd like to have some documentation on how to integrate this without sourcing third-party javascript from a page.

This is something that I've wanted for awhile. Even better would be recording session data your collecting and then giving a means to play it back so you can actually "see" the what the user does. Maybe using Selenium or something for the playback. This later feature would be killer for business users who would likely find the current event stream a bit intimidating.

I think your right though. Being able to watch 20ish user sessions for particular flows would really help you understand how to tweak things to improve conversion rates.

Thanks! That's exactly where I want to take it! It'll be hard to do right, but definitely the vision.

I've had this idea for a few months and really wanted to build it. Imagine being able to record every user interaction, seeing their mouse move and following them through pages.

The difficulty lies in replaying activity for web apps with logins, sessions etc.

Anyway, great job implementing this, I think it's a great idea and you should carry it forward!

Thanks! You nailed the difficulty right on the head.

Looks pretty cool... I like the idea of the one-to-one analytics tool, since other tools don't seem to do this (that I know of, at least).

However, one quick design point is the "Discover how people interact with your website" header is extremely hard to read since it's basically black on gray. Not sure if this is just my monitor's brightness levels or browser (Firefox 4.0.1), but I would recommend changing that up to be easier to read.

Other than that, I'm looking forward to checking it out more!

Will do, thanks!

This is really awesome. I just hacked together something similar for my website yesterday to show me guests / users activity on the site. Can't wait till you guys open it up, especially if there's an API to stream it on our own dashboards.

One note: after I filled out my info and clicked submit it kept the "what are you looking for" field on the page.

Another note: I included the referrer which I think is going to be pretty useful to know.

Heh, I noticed that problem from watching the stream.

I thought it may be nice to keep it there, so people can fill it in if they left it blank, or maybe edit it.

Turns out, people don't expect it to be there, and I saw several people hitting "Send" multiple times to (I assume) get rid of that box. :)

Yeah it feels counter-intuitive.

Really like what you're doing, can't wait to replace my dodgy little hack job!

Why do I have to enable websockets on Firefox 4? Perhaps using a websocket library that is compatible with older browsers might be a good idea.

Mainly just because I wanted to keep it simple for this test, and I assumed there would be enough people who would either enable, or use chrome/safari to get some good feedback.

I'll use the data I get from this test and decide whether I should support older browsers or not.

Nice idea and implementation. However my first thought after reading the title here and the domain name was that it was an analysis tool for Salesforce Chatter (http://www.salesforce.com/chatter/whatischatter/). You may want to check if there are any trademark implications.

Thanks, I'll check into it.

Heh, you're fetching some number of events from database and then grouping them. I've clicked a number of times on page, and on reload saw just this single event (x30 or something) instead of list of events.

Good catch :)

Yes, for now it's very basic. It'll be better fleshed out when I launch it (grouping on the backend instead of the front end, for instance)

I think GoSquared (http://gosquared.com) have something of this flavour of interaction as well.

Very useful tool. Especially with a large data set you can analyze where people are clicking and the most common paths through a design.

Wow, love the design and idea! I might have to use this in my next app!

not working with latest Chrome on mac

11.0.696.68? 13.0.771.0 canary? ?

Works fine for me. Ps. this is AWESOME!

i am n00b in webdev, but i have a feeling this is pretty useful tool.

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