Reading Heatmaps

I posted a couple days ago about CrazyEgg and the heatmaps they generate. I wanted to share one of my heatmaps with you because I think it reveals something we often neglect as developers. The heatmap below is from the Code Snippets area of Dream.In.Code. You can see a lot of the clicks are on the search box. I hadn’t realized until now how much that search box was being used and after doing a search myself, realized the usability is very poor. I’m going to add a heatmap to the results page for that search and move the search form higher on the page since it is used the most. I’m hoping this will keep visitors around longer and help them find the information they need.