Move Map

A move map is a colour visualisation showing where visitors' mouse pointers moved or paused most often on a page.

It is built by sampling pointer coordinates at short intervals and accumulating those points over an image of the page. Its appeal is that it produces far more data than clicks, and that is also its weakness: the old assumption that the mouse follows the eye was weakened by later studies and holds only for part of user behaviour. More importantly, phones and tablets have no pointer at all, so the map simply does not exist for a large share of traffic. Its defensible use is spotting hesitation, where the pointer lingers or shuttles beside an element, rather than measuring attention.