Our goal as web shepherds is to make it easy for our users to not only find information on our sites, but share that information with others.

At my college, we’ve been using the AddThis service for several months. I like the amount of customization that AddThis gives me, and I especially like the analytic data that AddThis shares.

Last night was the first chance I really had to dig into that data. And what I saw surprised me. The service users are utilizing the most? Twitter? Facebook? No. Printing.

I try not to print too much, but sometimes I find myself needing some information. If you haven’t yet set up a print style sheet, check out this post by Nick DeNardis over at EduGuru.

In 2003, we launched a web application on our campus that allows users to send us web changes and initiate new web projects. Here’s the first screen users see when they want to send us an update. Other than a new field or two, it hasn’t changed at all since 2003.

For 6 years, this form has worked just fine. Campus users who have used it since its launch have had no problems at all.

But for people who are newer to campus who need to send us updates, we’ve noticed something interesting. If you enlarge that screenshot above, you’ll see we ask for a field called “Title.” Our web team interprets this to be something like “Update Orientation Dates” or “Post a new picture.” It’s a title to the project they are sending us. Newer people on campus were putting in their job titles in there and our team was getting projects with the title “Secretary.”

After a rash of them the last few weeks, we made a simple change. I changed “Title” to read “Project Title.” It’s a change that took about 15 seconds and involved no changes to code or other functions behind the scenes. Here’s the new form:

I also took away the “reset form” button that had been there since launch. It was in the way and could potentially cause confusion.

In the end, I think this will save some confusion and give our web team a bit more information on the projects we’re being sent, that’s a good thing.

Do you have any examples of quick fixes that you’ve made to an app? I’d be interested to hear about them.

It’s a tough question to answer, and often it can be hard to track, discover and hopefully improve. You’ve got focus groups, user studies, surveys and so on. In my mind, nothing beats watching people try to use the site.

There are a few services online that will do that, including CrazyEgg, Clicktale and TeaLeaf. Now there’s a new site to help you track user activity.

Enter Userfly. It’s a new online tool that allows you to watch users interact with your site. They accomplish this with one line of javascript that follows where your users are mousing, clicking, and so on. You track these sessions and you can go back at a later time and playback in real-time what the user was doing.

Here’s a video overview.

userfly.com from Chris Estreich on Vimeo.

It looks like a great tool, and right now it’s free to try, and they’ll track 10 users an hour. They have a pro plan with allows for unlimited users, but they haven’t figured out a pricing structure yet. From their website:

We are still trying to figure out our pricing structure, but we will most likely charge per user, and let you set a cap on the amount you’d like to pay. Once your cap is hit, we stop capturing users, and you can buy more captures at any time.

Sounds like a tool definitely worth checking out.

Update: They’re experiencing heavy loads after being featured on a few sites like Read Write Web today, so they’re getting a bit hammered. Maybe give this one a few days to try out.