Clicker Trail

Playstation 3 owners may feel that the above image reminds them of the Folding@home program they can perform to assist Stanford University’s chemistry department with cancer research, but it’s actual just a visual record of Kitsune Noir’s mouse movement while mocking up a website in Photoshop.  Dubbed MousePath, this small application follows your cursor for a set amount of time, tracking where it goes and where you click.  There are links for PC and Mac downloads on the site.

Besides the obvious Jackson Pollock resemblance, this program also reminds us of the macros that can be programmed in Office suite products and an old PC program named GhostMouse that would trick the computer into thinking that the user was present and active – something important to some old file downloading applications.  It’s like abstract art created in a functional way.  Such is a tool is useful for interaction designers and focus group researchers to see how users interact with their sites and programs, though it only tracks mouse, not eye, movements.  From a usability standpoint, such outputs will highlight the design conventions being used and reaffirm or contradict expectations had regarding interactivity.

[via Kitsune Noir]