Home Page Usage: Heatmaps and usage summary for October 11 - 17, 2009
What is this? This page presents usage information for the Library home page for the week spanning October 11 through 17, 2009. Information includes heatmaps and basic usage stats. For comparison, two heatmaps from September are also presented.
Why? This can give staff an idea of trends in user behavior. This is one of many assessment activities that are currently underway. For more information contact the Digital Projects Department.
Heatmaps
What is a heatmap? Heatmaps are a graphical representation of where patrons clicked when visiting a web page, in this case the Library home page. Cool colors mean fewer clicks, and warm colors mean more clicks.
How did we make heatmaps? We followed steps outlined in the blog post "The definitive heatmap" to create our heatmaps. This method uses javascript, Ruby and RMagick.
Four heatmaps are provided for comparison:
- The left column provides heatmaps for the week of October 11 - 17.
- The right column provides heatmaps for the week of September 13 - 19.
- The top row provides heatmaps aggregating all clicks on the page during the week.
- The bottom row provides heatmaps showing a randomly selected block of one thousand clicks.
Week of October 11 - 17, 2009
All clicks spanning week of Oct 11 - 17
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1k clicks early in the week Oct 11 - 17
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Week of September 13 - 19, 2009
All clicks spanning week of Sept 13 - 19
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1k clicks mid-week Sept 13 - 19
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Note: The heatmaps represent clicks on the homepage recorded via a click log. Unfortunately, the log only records the x,y coordinates for each click but not the time of the click. There is no way to be certain what news items or blog posts were showing when a particular page coordinate was clicked since the news stories and blog posts that are displayed on the homepage change frequently, and sometimes hourly. Because the click logs are rotated weekly, we can narrow down a time frame by week (e.g. we know that the clicks illustrated above were made during the two weeks noted above).
Putting this in context: the numbers behind the October homepage heatmaps
For October 11 through 17, 2009:
- Total pageviews for the homepage = 55,925 (14.64% of pageviews for library.duke.edu)
- Patron Location: 85% Durham, 15% everywhere else
- Operating System: 75% Windows, 24% Macintosh, 1% Other
- Browser: 49% Firefox, 30% Internet Explorer, 17% Safari, 4% other
Homepage usage compared to our other stuff
For October 11 through 17, 2009:
Homepage usage compared with other parts of the library.duke.edu domain
| directory (or page) | % of total Pageviews |
|---|---|
| /digitalcollections/ | 33.80% |
| /research/citing/ | 31.34% |
| index.html | 14.64% |
| /specialcollections/ | 3.22% |
| /services/ | 1.77% |
| /exhibits/ | 1.38% |
Homepage usage compared with our library domains
| Domain | number of pageviews |
|---|---|
| library.duke.edu | 382,030 |
| find.library.duke.edu | 206,014 |
| library.duke.edu/index.html | 55,925 |
| catalog.library.duke.edu | 37,463 |
| scriptorium.lib.duke.edu | 16,770 |
| guides.library.duke.edu | 6,955 |
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