telescope.js

made for and by designers to measure user engagement with web applications

Why Telescope?

Analytics tools today are optimized for tracking websites and apps that have already been launched. What about a prototype or beta release where we have dozens, not thousands, of visitors to collect data from?

Our goal is to provide a more complete picture of user engagement. We are building telescope.js to watch the nitty-gritty of in-page interactions, from clicking on AJAX tabs to filling out forms and scrolling down the page; we want to understand the rhythm and rhyme of a user's journey.

Setup

Telescope is available as a plug-in for both jQuery and Zepto. For best performance we recommend including the script immediatley before the closing body tag. Telescope will run automatically when included.

		<script type="text/javascript" src="http://zeptojs.com/zepto.min.js"></script>
		<script type="text/javascript" src="javascripts/telescope.js"></script>
	</body>
</html>

Dependencies

Mixpanel

Telescope uses Mixpanel to store and analyze data points. Sign up at mixpanel.com and paste in the tracking code provided here:

• https://mixpanel.com/docs/integration-libraries/javascript

Zepto or jQuery

Be sure to include the Zepto or jQuery library before Telescope in your HTML.

• http://zeptojs.com
• http://jquery.com

What We Look For

Here are the data points we track today:

• Window Width & Height (on page load and resize)
• Screen Width & Height
• Address Bar URL (e.g. /contact)
• Hash (e.g. #tab1, including hash changes)
• OS & Browser (provided with Mixpanel)

Roadmap

Some ideas we have for future commits:

• Page Scrolling
• Forms
• Buttons & Links

If you see something missing that could be helpful to your design process, let us know (we are @paperequator on Twitter).