Analyze session recordings

Business benefits

Watch users interact with site components and identify areas in which they struggle, get confused or frustrated, or give up.

Check that session recording is set up on the website, using a tool like Hotjar, FullStory, or Clarity.

Go into Google Analytics and identify key pages for which you would like to uncover insights.

Consider:

  • High traffic pages which don’t convert
  • Landing pages with high bounce rate
  • Pages with known or assumed UX issues from other research or a UX heuristic review.
  • Key elements of the site, such as the filters, site search, or forms.

Set aside a specific amount of time to watch session recordings.

1 hour of watching session recordings is enough to at least highlight some areas of opportunity to dig into further.

Once you’ve found an area you want to investigate further, use filters to help you identify more sessions with similar characteristics or behaviors.

Identify common UX triggers that could give interesting insight.

Include:

  • Using the menu and moving the mouse pointer within the menu area.
  • Rage clicks – successful clicks in an attempt to perform an action.
  • Clicks on elements that are not links.
  • Scanning around the website with the mouse, hunting for content.
  • Scrolls up and down a page with no interaction.
  • Visiting a page and immediately returning back to the previous page.
  • Long pauses or delays where the user may be lost.

Tag each useful session you discover with a category.

For example, rage-click or click-unclickable-element.

Create an animated gif or short clip of each problem/opportunity area and embed it in a slide to use in reporting to stakeholders.

Add an informative heading and brief summary of what it shows and what we can do with this insight.

It can be beneficial to reference insight from other research sources here, since heatmaps and session recordings are open to interpretation. Use other sources of data to generate a hypothesis about what is happening.