With only 55% of companies performing any user experience testing at all, so many of them are getting left behind in the dust. It is up to us to ensure we do so much better than them and show why the products we make are a cut above the rest.
One of the best products at our disposal are user experience session replay tools. Read on for an introduction to these essential products, as well as information on how to make sure your company benefits from them in the future.
What Are User Experience Session Replay Tools?
Clients can either install this technology on their machine or add it as a plug-in for websites and browsers. They allow UX designers and others to look back on how users interact with their products in a real-time and anonymized manner.
Many of these pieces of technology allow you to scrub back and forth through time, seeing each interaction a user makes. This may simply be mouseclicks and cursor movement but can also tell you a lot about where a user focuses their view.
The benefits of this are immeasurable. First of all, if users are often having trouble navigating your site, you will be able to determine the exact steps they took. Secondly, you can see if users ignore certain sections of the website due to the layout of screens and the user’s flow through them.
There are also specific “tells” users may have when interacting with the page. From these, you will be able to see if a user is uncertain about what they are viewing.
Session replay tools can show you double-clicking, tracing text with the mouse, or long pauses. Any of these could show a redesign may be necessary.
What Can AI Add?
In simple terms, artificial intelligence can save you a great deal of time when handling session replays. While the vast number of replays will be similar, anomalies will appear in the user interactions of a handful of them. This is where artificial intelligence can work.
These are not simply interaction anomalies such as rotating a device, clicking multiple times, or zooming when one does not need to. It could include accessing locations deep in a website or app’s interface as a user looks for a specific setting.
Artificial intelligence can give an insight into unusual user actions that may fall outside of the norm. UX specialists can then focus only on these interactions. They will not need to spend a long time trawling through user records looking for times a customer may have slipped up.
Alternatively, artificial intelligence can combine user records over both positive and negative interactions. They can look for trends in how users who stick around act compared to those who leave.
For example, those who continue to use the product may be those who make at least one transaction, whereas those who do not complete a sale may be more prone to abandoning their experience.
Having this level of understanding allows designers to get much more insight. They can even do so without needing to interview a single user about their experiences.
The epitome of its benefits is that AI analysis can also bring to the forefront problems that actual customers may never realize. These may be due to unconscious decisions rather than conscious problems. Therefore, AI can uncover issues that will never reveal themselves through interviews or forms.
Other Benefits
There are other advantages to using a session replay system to analyze your customer experiences. For example, a well-made system will be able to offer you end-to-end feedback of a user’s state when they encounter issues. Not only will you be able to see what a customer is doing, but you should be able to view the system’s current state.
Being able to track the exact cause of a user’s issue end-to-end, down to the specific line of code that caused the problem, will save your developers hours. They will thank you for preventing them from needing to debug quite so many lines of code. This will end up saving you months of man-hours down the line and a lot of money.
The AI will also be able to investigate the kinds of devices users of your app or site are using. It may flag up, for example, that a specific OS or tablet ends up with users bouncing from the initial screen regularly. With data like this, you can track down that specific OS or device and ask your QA department to use it to find out what is going wrong.
If you are fortunate, this will indicate several minor inconveniences that are specific to different kinds of users. Other possible issues may include global location, demographics, or other unique identifiers. Each of these could cause unforeseen problems the artificial intelligence would be able to highlight.
Privacy
Finally, there is one more benefit to an artificial intelligence scanning all of your session replays: It will ignore all private information your users’ input. Various AIs will be able to scan your replays for any hints of private data and prevent them from being visible to your designers.
This allows you to not need to worry about needing to mitigate these concerns in the future. Instead, you can focus purely on what matters: Giving your users the best experience they can get.
What Next?
There is little doubt that artificial intelligence scores a big win. They help any company dipping its foot into the world of user experience session replay tools. It can save time, money, and frustration for all involved.
We have more informative articles like this one on our website. Check it out for other features you may wish to learn more about.