A practical checklist for session recordings
It comes up on almost every project, usually later than it should. Run through this the next time session recordings comes up.
More dashboards rarely produce more decisions. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.
The checklist
- Ten recordings will teach you something surprising
- Mask personal data before recording anything
- Watch the sessions that failed, not the happy paths
- Someone is named as the owner
- There is a date to review it again
Why this earns attention
Ten recordings will teach you something surprising. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.
The short version
Data you do not trust is worse than no data, because it gets quoted anyway. Three things worth confirming about session recordings before you move on:
- Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
- Watch the sessions that failed, not the happy paths — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.