Getting started with session recordings
It comes up on almost every project, usually later than it should. A short on-ramp to session recordings for teams who have not touched it before.
Measurement is only useful when someone has agreed in advance what they would do differently. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.
Why this earns attention
Ten recordings will teach you something surprising. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.
Your first week
- Find out what is already in place
- Mask personal data before recording anything
- Change one thing and measure it
Watch the sessions that failed, not the happy paths. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.
In practice
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
The point is not perfection, it is knowing which of these you have consciously chosen to skip.