Question

I’m not sure if “user metrics” is necessarily the right term to use but essentially I am interested in gathering certain kinds of data about my users as they browse my site, probably just during a private beta.

An example of the kind of thing I am interested in, albeit not applied to a web application, is the click tracking employed by Mozilla using Test Pilot. This allowed them to determine, for example, which UI elements were most important to their users.

Some examples of the things I would like to record:

• the number of clicks on different UI elements
• the time it takes for users to complete certain tasks like fill in forms
• the number of times a user submits a form with invalid data and, if they do, what fields are invalid and how they are invalid

Now I could, of course, code something like this from scratch but I was wondering if there existed already some sort of library to do this for me. I am using both Rails and jQuery so whatever I use must be compatible, and preferably based upon those frameworks.

Unfortunately, having no experience or knowledge of this sort of thing, I have been able to find anything through Google but the Firefox example above comes closest to the type of thing I want to achieve. I’ve also checked various Rails and jQuery sites but either there is nothing out there or I am lacking the correct terminology.

Note: I am already aware of A/B testing and this is the closest kind of testing I can find to what I have in mind but is obviously very different still.

Answer 1

I would recommend Google Analytics.

We do this kind of thing a lot at work, and GA’s Event Tracking is pretty much perfect for it. This is how you use it:

$("#myButton").click(function(){
    _gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Category', 'Action', 'Value']);
});

Cheers