Bing releases Clarity, an open-source UX analytics tool

Bing announced Wednesday the beta release of a new analytics product that lets webmasters see how users interact on their websites. With Clarity, site owners can replay user sessions and use the behavioral insights to optimize their sites for better conversion, engagement and retention.

The free, open-source tool collects users’ mouse movements, touch gestures and click events.

Why you should care

A bad user experience can quickly cost you a lead or sale, and it may be an indicator of a bigger problem with your website. There are many user experience analytics tools already available to help webmasters and marketers identify website pain points for users. Clarity could be a complement to those tools or be a good place to start for sites not currently using one.

By watching user session replays, you can see how users interact with a web page, including mouse movements, touch gestures and click events.

Food blog Cook with Manali was an early tester . In using Clarity, the site owner discovered that users weren’t making it through introductory text to the recipes. Based on that finding, she added a “Jump to recipe” button to give users a faster path to the recipe content.

More about the news

• Clarity works on any HTML webpage (desktop or mobile) with the addition of a small piece of JavaScript to the website.
• The tool is available to site owners through their Microsoft Accounts. Since it is still in beta, once you create a project in Clarity, it will be added to the wait list. Once the project is approved, you’ll be given the code to add to your site for the program to start gathering data.
• It’s currently compatible with the most common top level domains such as .com, .edu, .au, .uk, and working on increasing compatibility with others.

About The Author

Robin Kurzer

Robin Kurzer started her career as a daily newspaper reporter in Milford, Connecticut. She then made her mark on the advertising and marketing world in Chicago at agencies such as Tribal DDB and Razorfish, creating award-winning work for many major brands. For the past seven years, she’s worked as a freelance writer and communications professional across a variety of business sectors.