Session recordings: the questions we get asked most

The advice here is unglamorous, which is probably why it gets skipped. The questions about session recordings that come up most often on our calls.

More dashboards rarely produce more decisions. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

Do we need to care about this?

Ten recordings will teach you something surprising. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

Can it wait until after launch?

Occasionally. More often the post-launch version costs several times the pre-launch one. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding.

How do we know it is working?

Watch the sessions that failed, not the happy paths. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

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

Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.