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User Session Monitoring & Session Replay

Features

Germain UX records users' interactions in real-time, 24x7, capturing every detail of what users 'see' and 'do' on a web application with pixel-perfect, millisecond-precise accuracy. This includes mouse movements, clicks, keystrokes, and page transitions. Automatic identification and analysis of valuable insights into the user journey, behavior, and frictions provide a comprehensive understanding of the reasons for drop-offs or poor adoption of an application or website. By integrating qualitative and quantitative analysis, Germain enables businesses to optimize their web applications, enhance user satisfaction, and drive improved business outcomes.

  • Qualitative insights are automatically derived from recorded user sessions, encompassing visual observations of user behavior, as well as instances of confusion, frustration, and wasted productivity. Germain UX's Session Replays are fully searchable, allowing manual exploration for additional qualitative insights within any recorded session or at scale. More details below.

  • Quantitative insights that quantify the user experience. More details below.

Some Background about Germain UX' Session Replay

It took our team a few weeks to create a mockup of our Session Replay mechanism. However, it required several years of effort to develop a pixel-perfect, millisecond-precise Session Replay that delivers actionable business impact at scale. This allows organizations to avoid the time-consuming task of replaying sessions throughout the year and focus on the ones that truly matter:

  • 2017: Version 1 of Germain UX's Real User Session Replay Monitoring & Insight

  • 2020: Version 2 of Germain UX's Real User Session Replay Monitoring & Insight

  • 2022: Version 3 of Germain UX's Real User Session Replay Monitoring & Insight

Video overview: https://youtu.be/tqDuvH41g4c

Use Cases

Improve UX, Adoption and Productivity

  • Engage and Motivate Employees (for example, by collecting user feedback in real-time, reviewing it in the context of their recorded sessions, and taking prompt action).

  • Accelerate the Resolution of User Complaints (such as reviewing or replaying what a user did before experiencing an issue, without the need to communicate directly with the user, and providing a swift solution).

  • Improve Operational Efficiency.

  • Accelerate the Identification and Resolution of Technology Issues

  • Identify areas where visitors didn't find what they were looking for.

  • Analyze drop-offs to improve conversion rates.

Accelerate Conversion

  • Reach out to visitors with targeted help and offers that are based on Germain UX’s identified interests.

  • Understand why visitors don't complete orders.

  • Identify missed Sales Opportunities e.g. identify chats that didn't go well, between your sales or service teams and consumers.

  • Reduce the mean-time to make an order (e.g. on an eCommerce) by identifying gaps or inefficiencies in workflows.

User Session Replay RCA Dashboard

As Germain UX records video of user sessions navigating the web application, its User Session Replay dashboard allows anyone (part of a team with access authorization) to replay recorded sessions and analyze user interactions.

Millisecond-precise UX Insights on User Session Replay dashboard - Germain UX

Horizontal Bar

Definition of each icon that may appear on the horizontal bar of the User Session Replay dashboard.

Activity/Inactivity

Ability to discern when a user is actively browsing a web application or engaged in other activities.

Session Replay with disabled user inactivity

Session Replay with disabled user inactivity - Germain UX

BP / Business Process Insight

A blue icon like this one below shows up on Germain UX’s Session Replay dashboard everytime a Step of a Business Process is performed. Germain UX automatically identifies and highlights when, how long and how effective a user is engaged in your critical business processes or workflows. More details on how to configure a business process.

Business Process Step on Session Replay

Business Process Step on Session Replay

Errors (Not seen by users)

Browser errors are automatically identified and analyzed by GermainUX. These are errors not seen by users but yet produced by an application in a browser.

Errors on Session Replay

Browser Errors on Session Replay - Germain UX

Errors (That impacted users)

Germain UX has the ability to isolate errors that affect users as 'User Error' from the millions of others that don't.

User Errors on Session Replay - Germain UX

More details on how to tag errors as User Errors.

Feedback

Real User Feedback (for NPS) allows your monitored users to provide feedback in real-time. This feedback is available in the context of the recorded session, which you can replay at any time. It's also accessible at scale on other dashboards.

Surveys can be slow, extensive, and often inaccurate. Germain's Real User Feedback Popup offers a more effective way to quickly identify widespread user complaints at scale and understand why a user complained by watching or replaying their session. Germain's Real User Feedback Popup can be enabled or disabled once Germain RUM JS or Ext is deployed. More details about the Real User Feedback popup are provided below.

Freezes

Browser freezes, what Google calls Javascript LongTask, are automatically detected by Germain UX and it looks like this.

Browser Freeze on Session Replay Dashboard - Germain UX

Video overview: https://youtu.be/Z59Dd6vfnYI

Notes

Ability to leave a note or to-do action for yourself or one of your teammates using Notes. Notes can be added on the Session Replay or on any other metrics and dashboards. More details about Notes.

Notes Integration on Session Replay

Notes Integration on Session Replay

Rages

A Rage click occurs when a user repetitively clicks on the same UI element (e.g., a button or image). Germain UX automatically identifies Rage Clicks, providing valuable insights to understand unclear page content or unresponsive technology.

Rage Clicks on Session Replay

Rage Clicks analysis on Session Replay dashboard - Germain UX

Example showing a User clicking 7 times on an image! - Rage Click on Germain UX

User clicked 3 times on the Search button - Rage click on Germain UX

Video overview: https://youtu.be/GzDAaRDi26I

Vertical Bar

Click, Event and Business Process

The vertical bar provides a list of Clicks, Events, Errors, Workflow (…) performed by a user while browsing the monitored application. Customizable color coding is available to help understand transaction success, slowness, and failures.

Example showing a User worked on a Critical Business Process “Bridgeport*ct to boston” - Germain UX

Insights

KPIs, Measures, Pivots

We offer a range of preconfigured Insights to analyze user experience, including:

  • ~20 KPIs

  • ~140 measures

  • ~50 pivots

Here are more details about preconfigured KPIs, Measures and Pivots. Additionally, you have the flexibility to create your own KPI, or we can assist you in doing so.

Details while replaying a session

  • Browser Position
    Germain helps understand how users position their browsers on desktops, laptops, or mobile devices.

Browser Window position on Session Replay

Browser Window position on Session Replay - Germain UX

  • Cursor
    The real user's mouse cursor is automatically replayed and circled in blue.

Real Cursor on Session Replay

Real Cursor on Session Replay

  • Key Press
    Any key pressed by a user is automatically recorded and replayed.

  • Load Time
    The real load time of web pages is recorded and replayed, useful for A/B testing and other use cases. Percentiles are automatically computed, allowing you to effectively identify your biggest load time issues and eliminate corner cases.

  • Mouse Click
    Mouse clicks or user touches are recorded and replayed.

  • Multi-Tab
    Every tab a user opens for browsing the authorized/monitored application is recorded by Germain UX. Other tabs are not recorded by Germain UX.

Multi-tab support on Session Replay

Multi-tab support on Session Replay - Germain UX

  • Selection
    Germain UX captures every interaction with dropdown lists, menus, and text.

    Text Selection highlighted on Session Replay

    Text Selection highlighted on Session Replay - Germain UX

  • Native Popup
    Replication of the behavior and appearance of any popup is often critical to understanding UX.

  • User Input
    Real-time recording of any user input (e.g., mouse clicks, keyboard strokes) during testing or analysis provides an authentic playback of user interactions.

  • Static Resources Versioning
    This feature involves versioning static resources like CSS, JavaScript, and images, ensuring that the correct versions of these resources are loaded. This is crucial for maintaining a consistent and functional user experience.

Business Impact (at scale)

As no one has the time to watch thousands of videos, Germain automatically identifies crucial insights from user session recordings at scale. These insights highlight significant frictions at the levels of behavior, workflow, and technology across the user community. Instead of spending days watching and replaying numerous sessions, critical insights are conveniently displayed on the Aggregate Dashboard, offering a comprehensive understanding of the most significant UX issues at scale. Additionally, more detailed dashboards, including Pivot, Drill-through, and RCA dashboards, allow for in-depth analysis of each UX issue.

Example of a Custom dashboard focused on reporting UX Insights at Scale, in real-time - Germain UX

User Behavior

Better than heatmap, Germain UX allows you to visualize the entire user journey, on an application or spanning across multiple applications and channels, within a single Flow Graph. The provided screenshot serves as a mockup to illustrate the concept. The flow portlet can be driven by Clicks, Process or Workflow milestones.

  • Clicks Analysis on a Flow Graph:

Germain UX - User Behavior.png

Click Analysis on a CRM app on a Flow Portlet- Germain UX

  • Business Process Analysis on a Flow Graph:

Germain UX - User Behavior-shopify.png

Process Analysis of Shopify Visitors on a Flow Portlet - Germain UX

Germain's search mechanism helps find most issues at scale. It searches within a session and across sessions (so you don’t have to open thousands of user sessions to know which sessions experienced an issue).

All meta and business data captured by Germain is 100% searchable, both manually and automatically. The 'blue bar' highlights the results of your search when something is found, helping to narrow down the section of the session that contains your search criteria. You can manually search for specific events, interactions, or attributes within recorded sessions.

Search into all user sessions at once

Germain allows you to search for insights (issues, business data, errors, etc.) at scale and across millions of session replays, so it is possible to quantify the impact of an issue, and you don’t have to watch thousands of sessions to identify the number of users affected by any given problem.

In this screenshot, a Germain user searches, across all sessions that Germain recorded, for all users that viewed or worked on ‘test opportunity 00003'. A similar search can be done for an error message, an order number, an organization name, etc.

image-20240306-210313.png

Example of a Germain user quickly finding all sessions that viewed “test opportunity 00003” - Germain UX

Search within a user session

Because the search is recursive, one can start a search on the above drillthrough dashboard, then drill down into any of the found sessions and still see the result of the search (i.e., the blue bar), helping to find where in the session the string/error/data is visible.

image-20240306-205728.png

Example of a Germain user searching for “test opportunity 00003” in a session - Germain UX

Automated Search

As an alternative to these manual searches, you can automate the search at scale via any aggregate dashboard.

Secured (GDPR, PCI)

Germain ensures that the data captured and stored adhere to the requirements of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliance, and other applicable data privacy and security regulations. User data is secured and handled with privacy and confidentiality in mind. More details about Germain’s data security, privacy and cookie consent mechanisms.

Component: RUM JS, RUM Ext

Feature Availability: 2022.1 or later

 

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