When session recordings is worth the effort

It is rarely the thing that gets a project approved, and often the thing that decides how it goes. Session recordings is not free, and pretending otherwise leads to bad decisions.

Measurement is only useful when someone has agreed in advance what they would do differently. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

When it is worth it

Ten recordings will teach you something surprising. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

When it is not

If nothing downstream depends on it and nobody is complaining, it can wait. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not.

How to decide

Watch the sessions that failed, not the happy paths. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

What this looks like day to day

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
• 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

If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.