Session recordings: what to get right first

This is one of those topics that looks small until it costs you something. If you only fix one thing about session recordings this quarter, make it the first item below.

More dashboards rarely produce more decisions. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

Start here

Ten recordings will teach you something surprising. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

Then this

Mask personal data before recording anything. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

Eventually

Watch the sessions that failed, not the happy paths. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

In practice

Measurement is only useful when someone has agreed in advance what they would do differently. Three things worth confirming about session recordings before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Ten recordings will teach you something surprising — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Most of the value here comes from doing the first two things, not all of them.