Three myths about session recordings

The gap between knowing this and actually doing it is where most teams lose ground. A few things about session recordings that get repeated more often than they get checked.

Measurement is only useful when someone has agreed in advance what they would do differently. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

“It only matters for big sites”

Ten recordings will teach you something surprising. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

“We can deal with it after launch”

Sometimes true, usually expensive. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly.

“Our platform handles it”

Watch the sessions that failed, not the happy paths. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

In practice

More dashboards rarely produce more decisions. 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

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