How to get session recordings right
It is rarely the thing that gets a project approved, and often the thing that decides how it goes. The short answer to session recordings is that it is mostly a sequence of small decisions, not one big one.
More dashboards rarely produce more decisions. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.
Why it matters
Ten recordings will teach you something surprising. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.
The steps
- Establish what you have today before changing anything
- Mask personal data before recording anything
- Watch the sessions that failed, not the happy paths
- Write down the decision so the next person does not re-litigate it
Watch the sessions that failed, not the happy paths. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.
Making it stick
What this looks like day to day
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
- Mask personal data before recording anything — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.