The next best app

12 Mar

Posted by Andy Brudtkuhl under General

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Pete Cashmore at Mashable pointed me in the direction of one the most promising web applications I have seen since Google Mail We’re not talking about another calendar or social bookmarking application to add to the list of ‘cool looking but not something I’m going to use’ applications that we have been seeing at a near exponential rate.

Hopefully this is part of a new move where people use ‘web 2.0′ for functional applications rather than trying to out design the latest trendy applications.

Okay, enough ranting. The jist of Crazy Egg is that in essence it is a stat tracker. But it is Mint on steroids. How much does it cost in comparison for Mint’s $30 Linux-only site license? Well, it’s free. But this is not your dad’s webserver stat tracker. This product was built with web designers, developers, and information architects in mind.

Crazy Egg gives you something amazing to help you layout your web application. You can see where people click the most. As you look at the screen it will overlay it with hotspots to visually tell you where people are clicking and how they are using your website.

Why is this important? As a designer or information architect you are in actuality organizing content. If your primary content is not getting the use that you think it should be with the amount of traffic you are getting there is something wrong with your design. Your information is not correctly laid out. Now with Crazy Egg you can put your most important primary content in the place where you know that your users frequent.

This application has the potential to be an essential tool for web developers and I am very excited about the possibilities. I will be covering this much more once I get my hands on it. I have heard nothing about the architecture so I am curious how it will work in the end. What would I like to see? I want an online tracker that takes RSS feeds from my webserver’s logs for nearly real-time tracking. We will see.