Glimpse into true user behaviors with session replays.
These videos provide key insight into how real people are already using your website or service.
What if we could see how people actually used a website, without being in a usability session with them? Sounds a bit creepy, but stay with me.
What are session replays?
Session replays are video recreations of sample user sessions, based on clicks and cursor activity. Services like HotJar and FullStory allow us to capture this activity and view how people broadly use the site or how they begin their site journey after landing on a specific webpage (ex: product category pages for ecommerce vendors). I want to emphasize, these are recreations of user sessions captured with consideration to user privacy. Here’s how HotJar explains it:
“Hotjar Session Recordings record user interactions without capturing any sensitive data. Users are anonymized by default, and session recordings are reconstructions of these anonymized users’ interactions on your site.”
Why do session replays complement qualitative user research?
Session replays give us this sense of what users do, but not why they did it in that way. This allows us to create have specific, behavior-based research questions which qualitative user research can help us answer.
Qualitative user research sessions provide insight and feedback on how websites, products, or services are actually working for the people they’re built for. This is one of our primary tools as user experience researchers.
However, there are some difficult aspects of conducting this user research:
- Recruiting the right participants, especially for specialized audiences.
- Observing truly natural behaviors during a usability test session
(funnily enough, it’s pretty unnatural for people to demonstrate how they would typically use a website, when they’re not actually looking to use the website). - Recognizing the difference between what users say they want, and what they may actually benefit from based on their behavior.
Here’s where session replays come in again. They allow us to view actual site visitors’ behavior, unfettered by researchers observing over their shoulders. We are able to create a clearer “big picture” view of how users interact with a website or service.
When to use session replays.
Here are some cases in which session replays have been a successful part of our user research:
1. Conducting exploratory research for any part of a website.
When we watch session replays, we can uncover problems or behaviors that we may not have found otherwise. Starting with general user behavior on a website can be a great jumping-off point for more in-depth research in qualitative user interviews, especially when you don’t have a specific project scope yet.
2. Conducting specific user research.
In cases where you have a defined project scope, this is a great way to view a specific page and get a baseline of knowledge about user behaviors and interactions. For example, if you are looking to revamp a specific page, use session replays as part of your approach. Let them introduce you to how people are using the site, and follow-up by recruiting users to have qualitative 1-on-1 sessions with.
3. Understanding website metrics better.
Sometimes, we notice unusual trends in website metrics and wonder what is happening on those pages. For example, we noticed a high amount of traffic coming into one webpage for one of our e-commerce clients. The strange part was the low time spent on the page. When we viewed session replays for that page, we noticed users cannot actually do much on that page, and the content available does not link to anywhere (on the site or elsewhere).
In another case for that client, we were seeing a drop in web contact metrics (various types of requests). We viewed session replays in which users opened those request forms and learned if and when users were abandoning forms, what form fields they lingered on, etc.
4. Conducting passive user research.
If you must focus time and resources on 1–2 other projects, you can still launch a session replay recording in the background. Those videos will be available for you to parse through at a more convenient time and are often the basis for new research efforts.
Conclusion
Session replays are now a valuable part of our UX toolkit. Next time you are conducting user research, ask yourself:
- Are session replays applicable in this case?
- Could we use them to deepen our understanding of user desires and behaviors?
We’re confident you will enjoy experimenting with this tool and uncover exciting findings.
