Track Mouse Movement for Decision-Dynamics Research

Mouse tracking captures the cursor's path — not just the final click — while a respondent answers a choice-based question. It's the standard technique behind decision-dynamics research: a cursor that curves toward an option before ultimately landing on a different one is evidence of competing pulls between choices, even when the final answer looks clean. Domandata records normalized x/y position samples over time and stores them separately from the answer itself, so enabling it never changes what the answer looks like to recodes, conditions, or exports.

Mouse tracking is a beta feature and a per-question option, not a question type — enable beta access in account settings, then toggle it on individual questions.

The toggle only appears on question types where answer options occupy distinct, fixed positions on screen — that spatial layout is what makes a cursor's path toward one option over another meaningful:

• Multiple Choice
• Dropdown
• Grid Matrix
• Conjoint
• MaxDiff
• Card Sort

Slider and Drag to Order don't offer the toggle because mouse movement already is their answer — there's nothing separate to infer. Free-text, media, and display-only question types don't offer it because there's no spatial choice to track.

1. Step 1: Open a supported question. Select a Multiple Choice, Dropdown, Grid Matrix, Conjoint, MaxDiff, or Card Sort question in Block Builder.

   Step 1: Open Block Builder

2. Step 2: Turn on Track Mouse Movement. The toggle sits in the question's options panel, above the type-specific settings.

3. Step 3: Preview and move naturally. Confirm the survey still feels normal to answer — tracking is passive and adds no visible UI for respondents.

   Step 3: Preview the question

Domandata samples cursor position at roughly 25 times per second while the pointer is over a tracked question, capped at 800 samples per question per response (about 32 seconds — far more than a typical decision takes). Samples are normalized to the question's own bounding box, the same convention used for Heatmap click coordinates, so trajectories are comparable regardless of screen size.

Each tracked question adds five summary columns to your export:

• Mouse Samples: how many positions were captured.
• Mouse Tracking Duration (ms): time from the first sample to the last.
• Mouse Path Length (normalized): total distance traveled, in fractions of the question's width/height — a longer path than a straight line to the answer suggests hesitation or redirection.
• Mouse Max Deviation (normalized): the largest distance the cursor strayed from a straight line between where it started and where it ended — the direct "curved toward the unchosen option" signal.
• Mouse Direction Reversals: how many times the cursor changed horizontal direction — a simple proxy for wavering between options.

These are summaries, not the raw path — a full trajectory can have hundreds of points, too many to usefully flatten into spreadsheet cells. The complete sample-by-sample trajectory is always available in the raw response JSON (under each response's metadata) via API export, for analysts who want to plot or model the full path rather than the summary metrics.

• Reaction Time Survey Questions for another millisecond-precision research measure
• Author-Defined Response Quality Rules
• Export Research Survey Responses