Imagine a customer walks into a retail outlet. If you follow them and keep note of their moves, you can recreate their authentic shopping experience. A session replay is precisely that, but exclusively for digital experiences.
What is Session Replay?
A session replay reconstructs a person’s interaction with a website or mobile app. It is a generated walkthrough video containing clicks, mouse movements, and page scroll recordings. Through this video, you may observe the aim of your users, their experience, and what might be done to improve their experience.
Session Replay FAQs
How Does Session Replay Work?
Session recording uses the document object model (DOM), a programming interface for web pages. The DOM controls what people see in their browser window and the underlying HTML code (the structure of a Web page).
Session replay tools record all DOM modifications made throughout the user session. Every time a user interacts with your website or application, the alterations are “events.” Replay software also records web components like CSS to provide accurate recordings even when your website changes. The end product is a video-like representation of the entire user experience.
Why Does Session Replay Matter?
Fulfilling Important Business Objectives
Knowing how customers interact with your online services can significantly impact conversion rates and revenues. Replays are also an excellent approach to improving employee onboarding. Teams can give specific recommendations that will help to optimize the onboarding process and get staff up to speed.
Gaining a Better Understanding of User Pain Points
Teams can identify typical user pain spots by capturing all events. For instance, “anger clicks” are quick clicks on the exact location when a feature is unresponsive. Replays allow you to watch these clicks and identify parts of your website or application that need to be fixed.
Enabling Faster, Prescriptive Modification of UX and UI Designs
UX and UI designers can learn about their users’ pain points to see how their design performs. Develop meaningful insights from millisecond-level behavior, so you can create the experiences your customers want.
Improving Overall Customer Satisfaction
Replays allow teams to respond more quickly by providing a quicker approach to understanding what users find unpleasant. You can immediately pinpoint areas for development by reviewing many session replays. Customer satisfaction can be significantly increased even with minor changes.
Identifying Effective UX Designs and User Flows
UX teams drive initiatives using research, testing, and analytics to create the finest products and user experiences. Session replay technology offers insightful data on which interactions aid or hinder conversion, and promotes more precise and practical testing of new ideas.
Session Replay Use Cases & Examples
The following examples of use cases will help you understand what session replay can do:
Roles That Can Benefit from Watching User Session Replays
If your work influences the consumer experience, session replay is for you. These roles may include:
- Product managers
- Product developers
- Engineers
- UX researchers
- Customer support
- Marketing
Examples of Positive User Experiences Session Replays
- Deeper scrolls
- More clicks
- More time spent on the site
- More highlighted content
Examples of Negative User Experience Session Replays
- Website performance problems
- High bounce rates
- Frustration and abandonment of carts by visitors.
- Rage clicks
- Navigation problems
- Legacy design and content problems
Root Cause Analysis Templates
Replaying a session provides a detailed view of the problems your users encountered, enabling your teams to begin debugging more immediately. Playbacks can also assist you in learning more about what inspires your users and results in a great experience with your app.
Things to Consider When Selecting a Session Replay Tool
Session Recording Analysis Features
A tool with quantitative analytic capabilities can inform you of what is happening on your website by examining aggregate trends. If you use a session recording tool that doesn’t analyze overall patterns, you will need to use a second tool to comprehend what’s going on with your website.
Replay Abilities
Session replay tools save data for various periods. To create long-term data-driven decisions, select a technology that can store the data for extended periods.
Root Cause Analysis
Implementing the appropriate script to enable session replay work on your site can vary in complexity depending on the tool. Some instruments require complex installation procedures that can take months to complete.
Privacy
Session replay systems frequently have filters in place to automatically encrypt sensitive data. The solution you use for your session replay must expressly state that they encrypt your customers’ sensitive data and store that encrypted data securely.