Attention Wizard vs Crazy Egg
I appreciate his sentiment as I have had the occasion to work with a designer I felt would do better on a short leash. However, there are many more great designers that will take into consideration usability and user experience to make for a better overall design. While I was reading his article I noticed that he was using images from a product called Attention Wizard (This is a product created by Site Tuners). So I ran Codero through the Attention Wizard and tracked our actual clicks through a product called Crazy Egg.

The bright areas on both images are suppose to be the most viewed and most clicked. As you can see the results are slightly different. This is due to the fact that Attention Wizard is an algorithm that is trained to believe that people’s eye path will work a certain way. Where as the Crazy Egg image is tracking actual clicks by customers of Codero.

Room to Breath, Not a Leash
If you provide your designer with information about demographics and the purpose of what they are designing, then you will get a fully-optimized website that excels in usability. However, if the decisions are made based on a favorite color or just because it feels good, then you have already cut your leash too short for your designer to create something good and usable.

Based on this data the Attention Wizard, which in general provides good information, doesn’t seem to be in tune with what customers are looking for and clicking on as they experience our site. If you disagree, feel free to comment below.

Good Designers come a Dime a Dozen…(pt 2) is a post from: Codero dedicated hosting blog