Yummy or Crummy?

When they first launched, both the Crazy Egg website and the application seemed a bit unstable. Can’t blame them, they were getting a lot of exposure even before the launch. Their product seemed well designed, the premise simple enough to understand and appreciate. Plus they marketed themselves really well, placing cute web 2.0 banners all over other cute web 2.0 sites.

Coupled with the instability, there were some issues that caused me to have a difficult time getting started on using Crazy Egg.

First, I got tripped up with their terminology. They use these words to mean slightly different (but very similar) things: session, page, and test. I didn’t read any instruction text (there wasn’t much) and I assume most people don’t, either. I realize now, that if I was using Crazy Egg for the exact purpose it was invented for I would understand those terms better. The app is for learning where your users are going, so that you can optimize placement for your ads, links, etc. So you set up a “page” to be watched by Crazy Egg, and then you’re supposed to try multiple “tests” of that page to see which version produced the best results. Me, I was just checking out what kind of traffic I was getting on a page, with no campaigns to test, so the subtle difference between the two words were lost on me. I still don’t know what a “session” is. I would imagine plenty of people would use Crazy Egg for simple traffic analysis, because their representation of the data makes so much more sense and easy to understand than other tools. For those people, Crazy Egg’s terms wouldn’t make as much sense as originally intended.

Second, I wasn’t sure if I had completed the steps to set up the page to be watched by Crazy Egg, even after the app told me I was done, and my page appeared on my “dashboard.” That’s because during the second step I was supposed to copy a javascript snippet and paste it into the page that I want monitored, but I hadn’t completed that task yet. Even though in my head I knew there was no way Crazy Egg would be able to begin monitoring my page without the javascript code, I was confused because the dashboard made it look like I was good to go. It would have been more clear if the dashboard had a status message like, “Javascript code was not found on the page. Have you pasted the code into your page?”

And this is a minor point, but the app doesn’t seem to support Safari well. The overlay markers are offset a bit, and background images don’t display for some reason. But I might be the one at fault here, because I’m still using Safari 1.3.2 on Panther. (I’ve been super lazy.)

In any case — after I got these “tests” running, it’s been fun to watch the heat map and the click overlays. They seem to be hard at work fixing the bugs to improve stability. I also see that they’ve been making some UI tweaks to enhance usability. It’s great that they’re not simply sitting back and watching after launch. They’re constantly improving, and that should be enough to erase any negative thoughts from the initial set-up.