Research method
Session Recordings
Session recording analysis involves watching recordings of real users interacting with the website, using a tool added into your website code. Recordings show the pages users view, where they scroll and click, and their mouse movements. It's also possible to see things like "rage clicks" where a user clicks on something multiple times in frustration.
When to reach for it
Session recordings can provide you with insight into real user's on-site behaviour which can help you identify areas of friction, frustration or barriers to conversion.
Observing session recordings can be beneficial for gathering an overall understanding of how users are interacting with your website, as well as digging into interactions with specific pages or elements.
Session recordings can also be used to watch users interacting with any live experiments. This can be beneficial from a QA and an analysis perspective.
Strengths and limits
Pros
Observe real user behaviour with no research bias; users don't specifically know they are being recorded.
Helps bring other data such as digital analytics numbers "to life", by providing a more visual representation of the data. For example, Analytics might show a high exit rate from the basket page, session recordings can help explain why this is happening by showing users interacting with the basket (and potentially experiencing issues).
Cons
Session recordings are open to interpretation, since there's a lack of explanation of the behaviour. You may see someone doing something, but you won't necessarily know why they are doing that (and you can't ask them).
Session recording analysis can be time-consuming, since you have to manually watch the recordings. There are ways to reduce this, such as speeding up recordings, skipping periods of inactivity and using filters to ensure you only watch the recordings that are most relevant to your research needs.
Practical considerations
Analysis & Interpretation
The primary consideration with session recording analysis is how to approach the analysis part. Typically one person within a team would watch either a set number of recordings or spend a set amount of time watching recordings. Although multiple people could also conduct this activity, perhaps focusing on different pages, elements or user type. It is important to establish a strategy for tagging and note-taking that is used consistently to support analysis and prevent insights from getting lost or diluted.
For example, say you're watching 100 recordings. You might see some behaviours in the first 5 recordings that don't appear to be particularly interesting, but after 80 recordings you see that this behaviour actually happened in the large majority of sessions you've watched. This is why it is important to tag all behaviours from the beginning (within reason).
It can be beneficial to gather multiple people together for analysis and interpretation of behaviours. Once you've watched and tagged multiple recordings, get together with your team to share what you found and hypothesise about why this behaviour might be happening. Since there is no way of knowing the truth at this stage, it can help to have multiple points of view.
Qualitative vs. Quantitative
Although strictly speaking, session recordings are a form of digital analytics and therefore quantitative in nature, given the time involved in watching individual sessions in order to truly pull quantitative data from this method, you can think of session recordings as qualitative and heatmaps as their quantitative counterpart. In a similar way to surveys being useful for gathering large quantities of data, and interviews being effective for gathering a smaller, but higher quality of insight.
Tools
Tools include Hotjar, Content Square, Full Story and Microsoft Clarity. These tools have a very wide range of price points, typically Hotjar was the tool of choice due to it's reasonable price point, but this has increased in price more recently. Microsoft Clarity offers a free solution.
Common tools
Go deeper
Recipes that use this method
A method earns its value when its signal corroborates others. Here is where this one does its work.
Last updated
.svg)
