I came across a useful free tool for creating heatmaps of your website design at Feng Gui.   The site allows you to type in your url or upload an image and it creates a heatmap based on what it thinks a real human would be most likely to look at.  The application uses a ViewFinder algorithm to create a saliency map based on objects in the field of view that stand out relative to neighboring items. 

Recently Feng GUI released the results of a study that they say proves the accuracy of the application.  According to the study, the heat maps produced capture 70% of what a traditional eye and mouse tracking application would show. 

I see this tool being useful for early and often testing of new layouts and designs.  Because it’s much quicker and cheaper than running a eye tracking test with multiple subjects, you can use this application at each iteration of a design to see if you are getting the desired results.   I don’t think it can be a true replacement for eye tracking, as the heat map only produces a static moment in time showing the highest areas of interest.   It doesn’t give you any insight whether humans will have difficulty navigating your site, understanding your product details pages or filling out the checkout form at the end of a transaction. 

 It’s a good time in the year to look at your site and determine if you are compliant. 

Please check out The Top Ecommerce Sites and let me know what you think. 

Currently I’m tracking on each site:

• Snapshots of the home page
• Google Page Rank
• Backlinks from major search engines
• Traffic via Compete
• Company data from ZoomInfo
• Types of technology used and sizes (i.e. html, images, flash, javascript)
• User submitted comments and reviews
• 1-5 Star ratings submitted by users
• References in the Blogosphere
• Google News

I plan to track in the future:

• Catalog features of each site (i.e. Reviews, social aspects, single page checkout)
• Stock & finance information
• Other traffic sources
• Open jobs
• Competitors
• Snapshots of other pages like product detail for historical reviews

The site, data, and code is still beta, so problems may come up.  If you see any, please send me a note of what you see and I’ll look into fixing it. 

Please contribute to the resource by rating and writing a review for some of the sites.  I’m primarily looking for thoughts on design, SEO, structure and ability of the sites.   If you have a blog or website, the reviews are set to follow, so in exchange for your review, you’ll get get a link back to your site.   Every comment is moderated for spam and foul language prior to it being published. 

If you have any thoughts, ideas on features or api’s that would be useful, or questions you would like to ask, please send me an email (link in the sidebar).

Last, a note of thanks out to Suresh.  I appreciate your help during late nights and weekends helping me put this together.    It’s appreciated.

Barnes & Noble refreshed their website recently and some of the additions are useful but overall falls short.    When you reach the refreshed site, a 1/3 of the page is dedicated to B&N picks presented in a scrolling flash window.  Unfortunately, you are only given a pause button instead of back/forward/skip a page controls.  This leads to problems when you are interested in an item and you don’t get your mouse up to it quick enough, it’s off the page and you have to wait for a full rotation to get back to it.   It’s also dissappointing that in 2007 the picks are selections chosen by BN without any regard to who I am. 

Another item of interest is the product cloud at the bottom showing the “Most Popular Search Terms”.   I don’t know how much others find this useful, but I’m really into tag clouds.  It’s useful to determine what’s hot in the space the cloud is segregated to. 

The problem with the implementation is that it’s only on the main page and it had search terms from the whole site.    I find it odd to see Halo, Harry Potter, Pulp Fiction and The Wisdom of Menopause all of the same popularity/importance presented to me.   On the main page, this is fine although not very useful.  But when I go to the landing page for the Computing & Internet category (or any other), there’s no product cloud.   This is where I think it has the most power.  First let me the consumer tell you a little bit about what I’m interested in.   Then present the hot areas that other people have been looking for confined to my area of interest.  In that context, it becomes an invitation for me to explore further that I probably didn’t intend to explore before. 

Customer reviews are still no where to be found.  I don’t get it.

I don’t know if they always had this, but I noticed that they have an option to purchase the books used from other resellers.   I’ve never found this feature to be that great on Amazon as I normally buy 5-10 books at a time online and I don’t want them coming from 3-7 places.   I would have much preferred to see customer reviews than this feature.

Lastly, I don’t know that it has any relation to this refresh, but BN teamed up with Digby to offer their books via mobile ecommerce on Blackberry’s.   A special Blackberry applet needs to be downloaded to puruse the catalog and purchase.  I’m going to download the app in a few days as it seems that the digby site is being slammed with traffic at the moment.