Interview with Crazy Egg Founder and CEO, Hiten Shah
I’ve recently been focusing a good majority of my attention on web analytics – both the science behind the numbers and the applications that deliver. All of this in a pursuit to deliver a better user experience through design and development – anticipating user expectations, testing results and implementing changes for success. I recently had the opportunity (the fortunate privilege) to ask Hiten Shah, founder and CEO of Crazy Egg, a few questions about his industry innovating service.
Crazy Egg is designed to help you continually test and improve your site. As they say it, Crazy Egg will help you “visualize your visitors” – I must say the experience is extraordinary; especially for those of us who are a bit more visual. I will admit that this didn’t originally start out as a positive review of Crazy Egg; I was initially disappointed and frankly, a little upset. My original discontent really stemmed from my own ignorance – I expected Crazy Egg to be something it was not intended to be and completely overlooked all that it was really offering (really doing a disservice to myself and the product). I had asked Hiten if he didn’t mind participating in this informal interview to perhaps enlighten others – who better to explain the service than the man himself?
Martin: Hiten, thank you again for taking the time. I’d like to start simple: what is Crazy Egg and who is Crazy Egg for?
Hiten: Crazy Egg is a simple testing solution to allow people to understand where their visitors are clicking on a webpage. Crazy Egg is for anyone that is looking to obtain a deeper insight into how visitors are interacting with their webpages. Currently it is being used by web designers, web developers Internet marketers and many individual website owners.
Martin: On an opposite note, is Crazy Egg for everyone? What is Crazy Egg not and who is Crazy Egg not for?
Hiten: Anyone with a website can benefit from the information that Crazy Egg provides. That being said, Crazy Egg is not an analytics package that provides detailed statistics about the visitors that come to a website. Crazy Egg is not meant to replace your analytics or statistics package, it is designed to help you improve your webpages by providing visual representations of where people are clicking.
Martin: It seems to be a buzz-word world we are working in and “web analytics” is a popular one. Is Crazy Egg a web analytics tool? If so, how is it different from some of the more common tools such as “Mint” or “Google Analytics”? If it isn’t, why and what would you call it?
Hiten: Crazy Egg is different then a traditional web analytics tool because it is focused on allowing people to test one page at a time, instead of test a whole website. The idea is to provide a simple solution to enable people to improve the effectiveness of their webpages.
Martin: Is Crazy Egg a standalone product for user testing? Can it be or should it be complimented with other web analytics tools/data?
Hiten: Crazy Egg can be used in conjunction with other web analytics tools / data, but it can also be used as a standalone product that can help people test, improve and re-test things in relation to improving their website(s).
Martin: How does one really get the most out of the data that Crazy Egg is producing? Are features like the “heatmap” simply visually impressive and “cool” – or is there a useful application for such visual representations of the data?
Hiten: To get the most out of the data that Crazy Egg is producing, a user must be able to either by themselves or through the help of their webmaster or designer make changes to their website. This way they can test how visitors are interacting with their website, and then make changes and re-test to make sure that the changes caused an improvement. The heatmap has many useful applications; one common use that we have noticed is that it can be used to allow people who do not care for statistics to still understand what elements are hot or not on a webpage. Another thing that people have used the heatmap for is to evaluate the how effective the content on their website is at converting visitors.
Martin: Crazy Egg seems to focus on understanding user behavior and adjusting our sites accordingly. Are there best practices for understanding that data and making these adjustments? Items such as knowing how long to test for prior to making adjustments, understanding why some elements are getting more clicks than others in close proximity geographically or verbally?
Hiten: In general for low traffic websites a test that tracks 1000-2000 visits can give people a good idea of how visitors are interacting with their webpages. For higher traffic websites, a test that lasts for about 1 week can be sufficient. Generally, the length of a test will vary upon individual circumstances, for example if there is a specific reason for a spike in traffic, such as website hitting the “top” of Digg or Delicious, this can skew your results because of the variation in the type of visitor coming to the website.
Martin: What is in the future for CrazyEgg?
Hiten: We want to continually improve Crazy Egg to help people “visualize their visitors” through the use of meaningful data and visualizations. We have only just begun exploring how visualizations can help people understand what visitors are doing on a website. You can expect to see more useful features and products from us in the future.
Martin: Thank you Hiten, I appreciate your time in this informal interview.
Crazy Egg shows you where your visitors are clicking and helps you test anything that you think will help improve your website. Hiten Shah is in the business of helping you track, evaluate, and improve your site to “get a clear picture of where your visitors are clicking and enhance your site’s results.” For those who haven’t tried Crazy Egg yet, I highly recommend signing up for your free account today and testing it for yourself – “start improving your site today”.
I’ve been testing Crazy Egg for almost a month now and plan on preparing a formal evaluation of what I’ve learned about my site and the adjustments I plan on making. I’ll test again in another month to see how my changes have altered user behavior on my site. It is extremely exciting to visually see how users interact with a site, especially as a designer; because I built the site with certain user assumptions. I often advise people to look at three things when developing a site architecture: what does the user expect, what does the user want and what do you want your user to want? You can answer the last one rather easily; it is the first two that are really tricky — unless of course you have the help of something as powerful as Crazy Egg.
- December 26th, 2006
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Crazy Egg seems like an awesome alternative to the traditional view that statistics equals meaningful analytics. At the same time, I feel like Hiten didn’t mention the other crucial step: user-testing. Yes, you can get a very broad view of what’s happening between users and your website, but you don’t get context. After user-testing and discovering the what is happening on a page, this tool will be great for telling you if your user-tests were a good representation of the rest of your users. It will also be useful to see the results from the iterative changes you make. But, I don’t believe it should be relied upon to drive changes themselves.
Thanks for the comment! In Hinten’s defense I should mention that I tired to keep this interview going in a very specific direction — primarily, what is Crazy Egg and what is not Crazy Egg. But, I completely agree, the basis for what really makes Crazy Egg great is the testing — if you don’t test, then there is no strategic point in using the service. Having visual data is only the beginning to understanding your users behaviors. It is the testing and re-testing that I believe will give you a more accurate representation of how your users are interacting with your site.
As a manager in a web development firm, I have been using crazyegg with success since they were really young, when they were having lots of server problems. At first, the problems made the service unusable, then a few months later there were just a few hiccups. I emailed Crazy Egg and Mr. Shah actually *called* me *immediately*. He walked me through a workaround and now I have several clients that adore the service as part of a larger statistical research package that I do. Great work, Hiten.
nice work m!
Ha. thanks.
i signed up for their free trial. we’ll see how it goes. mostly i like this trend of interviews recently. making news. good stuff.
Good luck — I am confident you will find it helpful.
Glad you like the interviews, I’ve got more coming. I am going to publish my interview with Brian Suda of “Using Microformats” and Alex Giron of CSS Beauty after the New Year.