Researchers and developers would track and record each time a user used the mouse to click something on the website, as well as the location of the event.
More recently, the term mouse tracking has been expanded even more to develop a much broader area of research in helping understand the human-computer interaction (HCI).
Specifically, researchers are trying to parse out what different individual movements mean as well as beginning to use mouse tracking in usability testing to improve products and pages.
Therefore, using this language, Web developers can track user's mouse movements simply by entering lines of code on a page.
It does not require any additional software to be installed on the user's computer; they only have to have JavaScript enabled for the researcher to collect data from the webpage.
Additionally, some tracking tools provide more high level analyses, such as heat maps and playbacks which can retrace the mouse's trajectory.
By using mouse movements in usability testing, researchers can determine if users are confused, if their expectations are met, where their attention is focused, and much additional information.
This tool can be especially beneficial in conjunction with other techniques used in usability testing, such as think aloud procedures, as this information can lead to a better mouse movement model.
[12][16][17] The knowledge gained from this can be used to re-sort search criteria based on individual relevancy and suggest other objects, products, or information that might be of interest to the user.
Mouse tracking allows Web developers to view the behaviors of actual users in their natural browsing environment instead of in a laboratory.
Specifically, they can see how difficult it is for users to find and use certain features, such as scroll bars or dropdown menus, or to locate important links.
[22] It has also been used to identify off-task behaviors in tutoring settings and in physics to understand how students perceive and process multimedia representations of real experiments.