Clixpy is recording your actions right now | Hacker News Reader

Clixpy is recording your actions right now

clixpy.com

60 pointsmariorz32 comments

Clixpy is a decent clone of clicktale.com, userfly.com, and exactostats.com, but doesn't seem to have a "shtick" that differentiates it from the other offerings. With userfly.com, we tried to make everything dead simple, and much cheaper than clicktale. We also focus on capturing quality user sessions (lots of page views, lots of actions fired per page, bounced users don't count against your quota).

However, at the end of the day, watching individual user sessions, one after another, doesn't really scale; you need a way to aggregate the data to identify trends that may suggest pain points for the end user, and we haven't really cracked that nut (and neither have our competitors).

Testing this now. One issue for me is that I get a lot of traffic from reddit, stumbleupon, etc.. these users don't stick around for more than 5 secs and they are going to use up my captures quickly. I would suggest only counting captures that have clicks.

Another suggestion: I'd love to be able to see how users browse a particular page, but i might have to wade through a ton of captures to do so. Would be cool if you captured every user session and I could then search to find some that include that page, then unlock those session by using some of my purchased credits.

EDIT: One problem I'm seeing is that when the user goes to a new page the timer freezes and it takes about 10 seconds to start playing again, but it jumps 10 seconds ahead, so you miss some activity there. Looks like th is is because my website takes awhile to finish loading (lots of images below the fold).

Great demo as soon as you arrive.

That is, hands down, the best demo I have ever seen on HN. I just showed it to my Japanese coworkers and I didn't even need to tell them what it was doing.

It seems to have zero clue that I have scripting turned off, so I see nothing interesting at all.

It is trivial to add script to tell the user, hey, this site is more interesting when you allow JavaScript. Why do so few sites do it?

Be nice if I could see how much it costs before I give it my email address :/

This what I found on registering:

You get 10 free captures on signup.

After that, plans vary from '$5 for 100 captures' to '$30 for 1000 captures'.

[edit #1]

I added this to one of my websites. Holy Shit, it is good! I've bought 100 captures for now, for $5.

[I shamefully admit that this is one of the ideas I had but didn't execute all. These guys have done an amazing job.]

[edit #2]

Thanks to paraschopra's comment, I checked out userfly too. I am going to try that too. Clixpy didn't detect keystrokes correctly on one of my websites. Lemme see how userfly fares for the same test case.

  Note to self : Competition is good. 
  ------------

It is like a neighborhood coffee shop getting more traffic because of a Starbucks opening nearby, contrary to the tiny shop's fears. I wouldn't have become a user of userfly today without clixpy.

[edit #3]

( Userfly dude rambles for quite a while in the demo :-) )

Notes on Userfly:

Userfly's performance can be better. Hmm. Definitely. But I like it too.

I wish Google released a product that has this functionality. I don't trust userfly or clixpy completely, since they didn't replay my test drive properly. But I'll definitely be using them until something more robust comes along.

I hope to god Google does not (though I would not be surprised if they _already_ do this internally)

Google already has a LOT of information about it's users. No more please

Google will get the data if it wants. Do you think that sharing that with us webapp creators makes it worse? Also, I don't necessarily want it to be only from Google... just want a solid tool that you can rely on. Google is the only company that came to mind when I thought who can deliver that.

No doubt. As I mentioned, in all probability, Google already does it. And sharing it with webapp creators does not make it worse. Heh.. I used to create web applications and am a developer for a MORPG.

Google kind of does this already - when you click on search results, it's not just a hyperlink, it fires an event onMouseDown to tell Google which results you're clicking on.

Google will end up where Microsoft is today if everyone keeps hoping that they become the boss of the internet; my guess is they will.

Didn't work for me - perhaps it needs Flash or Java?

In any case I thought stuff like that has been done for years? There are apps that draw you a heatmap of your site based on mouse movements, too?

Wow very nice. I wonder how it handles different browser renderings though? For instance the clicks and stuff could seem off.

I have a lot of experience with motion-recording web apps like this (built one and launched it a couple years back, and it worked exactly as this one does). Rendering issues can become a major problem with some pages, as well as things like Javascript executing "on page load" (while the recording has already started playing), or an element changing size/position, that can throw off an entire recording.

This is not to mention the fact that if you change the page (unless Clixpy has some provision for this), your old recordings are entirely useless.

With regards to accuracy, ignoring the aforementioned problems: a script like this can be fairly accurate, and the actual "recording technology" behind this is fairly simple (albeit still interesting). The data can be useful, provided you enjoy wading through many, many very unhelpful recordings.

The real challenge, and what I believe is more useful, is extracting and distilling the data into heatmaps, graphs, and the like. This would provide someone with more of an overview based on the recoded data (think CrazyEgg, but even more in depth). This is something which I am working to solve, as is -- as someone else mentioned -- ClickTale.

Regardless, I commend Clixpy for diving into this space.

There was a similar app by HNer I remember: userfly.com

I tried userfly on a site I operate and it really wasn't much use because it was incapable of recording the advanced AJAX stuff the site does. It also sends requests back to the original server on playback which would have caused me some problems.

Very cool and extremely well implemented.

But somehow my paranoia bubbles to the surface on viewing that demo. This is in a way scary, getting even more information on the users.

It's probably just me but I'm getting increasingly paranoid of the amount of information that is being collected on the Internet (and a LOT of it without disclosure)

NoScript is your friend.

Very cool, but in itself not very useful? Can you add some metrics for tracking how users use the site? (If this is already there plz ignore)

What would help me is seeing the aggregation of use across several users instead of the mouse movements of one.

I think the concept is similar to Clicktale and even simple User testing. But instead of asking users to perform tasks you get to watch real users using your site.

Something quantifiable is nice, but after watching a few of these videos of your users, you will quickly find some of the big problems your site faces. You likely won't notice the small ones, but you should be able to see some of the big ones, which are the ones that need your greatest attention anyway.

I also would like to see their price before giving them an email.

This is completely terrifying.

You don't know who Clixpy is. You put this on your site, a user types in their password and so far we just have their word that they are not recording it - has anyone looked closely at the JS?

Yes, but that's true of any widget/Javascript you include. Why is this particularly scary?

Looks great...another site like this that I've been using lately is Clicktale. You get 100 free captures per week on one domain, or 20,000 per month for $99. One of the nice features that Clicktale has is scrolling heatmaps, so you can see what percentage of users scroll to different parts of your page, where they spend the most time, etc. Useful for landing pages.

This looks amazing. I've been wanting something like this but I didn't realize it was possible.

This is going on my website tonight.

[EDIT]

Looks cool, but still has some bugs in it. In particular, some of the Javascript that is on your site seems to activate while you watch the replays.

I thought perhaps it would work with the iPhone but that does not seem to be the case. Looks pretty neat and simple. As others have said similar to userfly.com.

The text I typed into the "AJAX" tab along with the Google results did not show up in the re-played demo w/ Safari 4 on OS X.

It seemed to double-click the checkboxes - selecting them and deselecting them.

Safari 4 final on Leopard, if it helps at all.

Not working for me -- after playback it shows just empty gray page.

Using Google Chrome 2.0.172.31 on Vista.

Does anyone know if this will work behind logins? Or does the site have to be visible from clixpy.com?

Didn't do anything on Chromium/Ubu.

"Clixpy`s Demo" -- wrong quote.

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