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

• 2024: Version 4 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 Dashboard

As Germain UX records videos of real 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 and find frictions. User Session Replay Dashboard is what we call a RCA dashboard that Germain UX offers as its 4th data visualization levels.

UX Insights

Activity/Inactivity

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

Business Process Insight

A blue icon, like the one shown below, appears on Germain UX’s Session Replay dashboard every time the user performs a "step" of a business process (BP) that is configured to be monitored by Germain UX. Germain UX automatically identifies and highlights when, how long, and how effectively a user is engaged in your critical business operations or workflows. More details on how to configure a business process. can be found here.

User Segmentation

Examples of segments that are preconfigured in Germain UX. Important to note this is just an overview of the segments that can be used and they depend on the application that is monitored.

• Behavioral Segmentation

  • Usage frequency

  • User status (new, existing)

• Customer Journey Segmentation
  This requires one or many Business Process(es) to be configured in Germain UX.

  • Awareness stage

  • Consideration stage

  • Decision stage

  • Post-purchase stage

• Demographic Segmentation

  • Role

  • Team

• Engagement Segmentation

  • Pages visited

  • Active Time spent

  • Social media interactions

  • App usage patterns

• Geographic Segmentation
  This may require some configuration depending on the application that is being monitored by Germain UX. please contact us.

  • Country

  • Region

  • City

• Needs-based Segmentation

  • Product/service preferences

  • Problem-solving needs

  • Specific use cases

  • Desired features and functionalities

• Technology Segmentation

  • Device type (mobile, desktop, tablet)

  • Operating system

  • Browser type

  • Technology adoption (early adopter, early majority, etc.)

• Transactional Segmentation

  • Purchase history

  • Average order value

  • Payment methods

  • Frequency of purchases

  • Time since last purchase

And here are more details on the preconfigured segmentation KPIs, which campaign they are coming from, etc.

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. In addition, filtering is available to keep most important events and hide these irrelevant.

User Errors (Seen by users)

Germain UX has the ability to isolate errors that affect users as 'User Error' from the millions of others that don't. More details on how to tag errors as User Errors.

Background Errors (Not seen by users)

Browser errors are automatically identified and analyzed by Germain UX. These are errors not seen by users but yet produced by an application in a browser or from the backend application layer(s).

Heatmaps / Overlays

Six heatmaps are available to help you analyze which parts of a page users engage with most or where they encounter issues, whether for individual users or across your entire user base.

Learn more about configuring and utilizing heatmaps in Germain UX.

Feedback (NPS)

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, technically called JavaScript Long Tasks, are automatically detected by Germain UX.

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

No Search Results

Germain UX automatically finds Users that failed finding something on an application (Salesforce, Siebel, Shopify, etc). Whenever a user search for something on a application by entering some keywords e.g. “blue pants” and that search results in not finding anything, Germain UX identifies that as a “No search results” and reports at scale or at the user session replay dashboard-level. Example of a SFDC user not finding something and identified by Germain UX.

Notes / Tickets (Share ideas/comments with your teammates)

Ability to leave a note to one of your teammate or yourself, by right-click (PC) or control-click (Mac) on the Session Replay Timeline or via context menu on the Session Replay content.

Notes can also be added on any other metrics. More details about Notes.

Rage Click

Repetitive and consecutive clicks on the same UI element (link, button, input field, etc.) are detected and referred to as ‘rage clicks’.

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

Dead Click

Clicks that do not have any effect on the page are detected and referred to as ‘dead clicks’.

Dev Tools

Germain UX Session Replay contains Dev Tools panel which contains many advanced and technical details about all the facts, events, BPs and other insights that occured during that session.

Console

Contains all the JavaScript console events (errors, warnings, info, …) occured during this session.

Network

Contains all the HTTP requests triggered during this session.

Business Process

Contains all the Business Process steps collected during this session.

Timeline

Contains all the facts collected during this session.

Info

Contains metadata about this session.

Custom Tab

Create your Custom Tab to make it easier to find things you care about within user session.

Example: "Sold Out" Custom Tab appears on all Session Replays where a consumer attempted to buy a product that was sold out.

Custom insights can be linked via correlation ID, username, or client IP, and can be applied to specific "target frameworks" (e.g., Shopify, Salesforce).

Other Insights

Browser-level Insights

Check all other browser-level insights that Germain UX detects and analyzes in real-time.

Browser Position

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

Cursor

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

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 and Multi-Window

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

Native Popup

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

Selection

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

User Behavior

Germain UX allows you to visualize the entire user journey, on an application or spanning across multiple applications and channels, via 2 separate portlets that offer different benefits.

Focused Flow portlet: journey visualization either driven by clicks, process data, story beat or some other custom metrics (e.g. Shopify Pixels) - Available starting in 2024.2

Flow portlet: journey visualization either driven by clicks or process data - Available until 2024.1

• Journey Analysis (via a Focused Flow portlet)

• Clicks Analysis (via a Flow portlet)

• Business Process Analysis (via a Flow portlet)

Search

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 through 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 ‘Petunia'. A similar search can be done for an error message, an order number, an organization name, etc.

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.

Recurring Search

If you find yourself searching for the same thing across thousands of sessions, save it as a filter or custom tab to make it easier the next time you need to perform that search.

• Save Filter
  Save your repetitive search as a filter:

  

  More details on Filters.

• Custom Tab
  Save your repetitive search as a Custom Tab:
  

  

  More details on Custom Tab.

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