Just finished watching a recording of how people surf my blog. I must admit it’s been an amazing eye opener. I can actually see how people interact with my site, what parts they read, where exactly do they try to click and exactly how my message is communicated.

It makes me want to stop that person, and tell him: “Hey, stop using my site like this! Can’t you see that I meant you to click that Red Big Button on the top left, instead of reading that yada yada legal stuff on the bottom right???”.

The future of getting-your-message-through??

I can see (a really close future) when I’ll be able to edit a website (i.e. my Facebook page? My online-product-landing-page?) in real-time (using dream-weaver?) while I see how real people (from google-adwords?)  interact with it (using clicktale?). This can become a transformation of site-building and online-marketing – just like the first terminals transformed the way people started to program. Malcolm Gladwel explained in Outliers: using terminals dramatically shortened the feedback loop of programmers, who before that had to feed their programs into card-reading machines. This transformed programmers from being anal-code-verifiers into the powerful hackers they’ve become today. Using ClickTale can shorten an on-line marketer’s feedback loop – and help him focus his surfer’s attention on the core message. This can transform our online-marketers, design and usability people from being statistics-diggers into real-time-attention-hackers. Wouldn’t that be neat?

ClickTale walk their talk

The usability of the serivce is that of a “Next, Next, Next” wizard. I can feel how minimal is the attention that is required by my side, and how short is the learning curve to get things up and running. I can imagine how the ClickTale team streamlined their own product experience using their own tools, and this must have been very gratifying because I’m sure this have raised their bottom line figures with very short feedback loops.

I highly recommend every site owner to try out this service. Even my very short experience with this service has opened my eyes to some severe usability issues I wasn’t aware of.

Disclaimer: Me and Arik (ClickTale’s cofounder) became friends a coupe of years ago. He’s been urging me for 2 years to try out his service. The first beta versions were a bit shaky, but when I came back to it yesterday – it’s evident they did a terrific job. Way to go!

BTW: Smile, you might be recorded as we speak 🙂

Disclaimer 2: Although you are being recorded, I don’t gather any personal information about you – so I don’t have any idea who you are when I watch your recording… Unless you leave a comment on my blog… Hmmm… I wonder if there’s a way to exclude text from ClickTale’s recordings… I’m interested in not to know how anyone I know interacted with my site…