Dialog usage analysis/heatmap tools

Question

Are there any tools out there, for MFC apps in particular, which can be used to gather data on how users use dialogs... of primary interest is which controls are accessed most often.

I'd guess one could write something that would plug into an existing dialog without too much fuss, but perhaps something (preferably free) already exists to help us improve our dialog layouts based on what users do?

Answer 1

I don't know such a tool for MFC specifically, but you could use

• Clickheat's standalone heatmap generator. PHP and MySQL, GPL.
• Pyheat. Python, MIT license.

You don't have to integrate them directly into your application. It would be sufficient to record clics and dialogs where they happen into databases/text files, gather them and use php/python to generate the heatmap.

If you don't know Python nor PHP, both offer very good examples and seem easy to use.