Firefox Heatmap Shows the 'Hottest' UI Elements

Mozilla Lab’s Test Pilot has been getting a lot of attention lately and for good reason. Test Pilot 1.0 has just been released and the team also announced that a variant of the add-on which will be integrated with Firefox 4.

Separately, the Mozilla metrics team, which probably appreciates Test Pilot more than anyone, is now releasing the results of a previous Test Pilot study, showcasing the usage of the various Firefox UI elements. And, instead of the plain old bars and graphs, they’re doing it with a much more stylish ‘heatmap.’

“[A] few weeks ago, we released the Main Window Usage Study to capture the remaining major UI elements of the browser, and provide more data-driven recommendations. Today, we’d like to present some initial findings from this study. Like previous Test Pilot studies, the main window study ran for 5 days and covered Firefox versions 3.5 and up. The sample consists of 9,667 users who have opted into the Test Pilot program AND opted to submit their data,” Mozilla’s Christopher Jung wrote.

The interactive heatmap overlays the results of the study with the Firefox UI and uses colors to determine which elements were the most used. The study found some expected results, like the fact that the address bar is the most used UI component, with 95.6 percent of all participants clicking on it at least once. The back button is the second most popular element, being used by 93.1 percent of test participants.

But other results were more surprising. For example, the New Tab button in the navigation bar, which is not enabled by default, is used more than the New Tab button in the tab bar. It is used by less people, but it is clicked more often, overall. You can draw your own conclusions on usage from the heatmap and the tool makes it easy to narrow down the data to a platform, Windows, Linux, Mac, or for a certain user skill level.