February 18, 2010 | Software and Downloads

Here’s a neat little application that makes a picture of your mouse movements as you use your computer. It’s sort of hokey, but I guess you could use it to track how people use your website.

Anatoly Zenkov, a Russian software and website developer, released the MousePath program just for fun. It keeps track of your mouse as you move it around the screen, and creates a line drawing of the result.

Download MousePath

The program is written in Java, so it runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Windows

The Windows version is a Windows executable. Download, unzip, and run the executable.

Ubuntu/Linux

Download the Java version and run it. It’s a JAR (Java Archive), so, for example, in Ubuntu Linux, right click on the file in Nautilus File Manager, and choose “Open with Sun Java 6 Runtime”.

Macintosh

Download the Java version and run the JAR.

Running MousePath

When you open the program, it shows a blank window. Just switch to your other windows, and carry on clicking or doing whatever you normally do.

When you think you have enough mouse movements recorded, come back to the MousePath program and press “s” to save your mouse movements. Or you can just save a screenshot of the MousePath window like I did:

Dots record where you pause, not where you click.

Interpreting MousePath

Anatoly has a Flickr page with screenshots of his mouse movements. Not everything has to have a grand purpose, and this is just sort of neat and interesting.

This could possibly be useful for user interface research, though. For example, looking at the following picture of Anatoly using the Java development environment Eclipse shows pretty clearly where the major mouse-based interaction is:

Resources

New York Times Bits blog article
Anatoly Zenkov
MousePath (Windows)
MousePath (Java)

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