Investigate Microsoft Clarity "Dead Links" — are there problems we should address?

[fancyham]

Overview

Importance: 4/5 (where 5 is most important) because it can identify frustrating usability issues

You will learn how to use Microsoft Clarity, a terrific user behavior analysis analytics package we use on Food Oasis.

This can be done by anyone on the team (researchers and designers may find this a great experience) and will probably take 4 hours to review recordings, 1 hr to write up.

Problem statement

We use Microsoft Clarity to do analytics to better understand used behaviors on our site.

According to its reports, about 10% of sessions have what Clarity calls "Dead Clicks" — users clicking on things that aren't designed to be interactive, such as plain text. This is a signal for us to investigate why users are doing this.

What is the cause of these "Dead Clicks" and what, if anything should we do to fix them.

Action Items

• Investigate the pages of our site that have the highest numbers of 'dead clicks' and analyze the recordings.
• Are those dead links errors or benign user behaviors? and if they are errors, what are the highest priorities for us to fix? (send to design and dev)
• Write up analysis, and actions needed (for example, fixing a usability issue). Are there insights to share with team?

Preliminary work already completed

I did a little preliminary research on a subset of those dead links:

On the /organization pages, it seems that what count as 'dead links' are actually people selecting and copying/acting on text… probably copying organization names or their details — perhaps to do additional searches on them or to map, or to place phone calls. More details here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dzIZ8vJw23mfthigtB8xj5KRUG5QmciNPPeQWDZiVjI/edit?usp=sharing

How to see dead click recordings:

Sign in to Microsoft Clarity

1. Go to Heat Maps tab
2. Change date range from 3 days to 30 days (to see more recordings)
3. Choose each of the top pages to investigate, starting at most popular
4. Change filter "Click" to "Dead Clicks" — change to each of the device types you're investigating.
   
5. View heat map and "View recordings" for each of the page elements with the most clicks.
   
6. Review recordings and analyze. Click "more details" to see a list of user interactions. The 'dead clicks' appear as purple markers.
   
7. Repeat recursively — edit the Filter to look at other HTML elements and pages. Use the "Clear" button to clear the filters altogether if needed.

If you are so inclined, also examine other types of clicks: Rage Clicks and Error Clicks

References

Introducing New Types of Click Heatmaps
Rage clicks – what do they tell you about user behavior?
Introducing: Click Errors and JavaScript Error Details