User Session Replay, Monitoring & Heatmaps

Features

Real-Time User Interaction Recording

GermainUX records user interactions in real time, 24x7, with pixel-perfect, millisecond-precise accuracy. It captures everything users see and do on a web application—including mouse movements, clicks, keystrokes, and page transitions—while remaining fully compliant and secure.

Automatic detection and analysis of user behavior, frictions, and journey insights provide a deep understanding of drop-offs, poor adoption, or workflow inefficiencies. By combining qualitative and quantitative analysis, Germain enables businesses to optimize web applications, improve user satisfaction, and drive measurable outcomes.

Qualitative Insights

Derived from recorded user sessions, qualitative insights include visual evidence of user behaviors as well as signals of confusion, frustration, and wasted productivity.

• Session replays are fully searchable.

• Teams can explore sessions manually for additional insights—either within a single session or across sessions at scale.

Quantitative Insights

Quantitative insights measure and quantify the user experience, providing data-driven context to support design, operational, and business decisions.
➡ More details below.

Background: Session Replay Evolution

It took only weeks to create a mockup of Germain’s Session Replay mechanism—but years to build a solution that is both pixel-perfect and business-impact driven at scale. This evolution now saves organizations from manually replaying sessions throughout the year, letting them focus only on those that truly matter:

• 2017: Version 1 — Real User Session Replay Monitoring & Insights

• 2020: Version 2 — Expanded Monitoring & Insights

• 2022: Version 3 — Advanced Accuracy & Business Context

• 2024: Version 4 — AI-Powered Session Replay at Scale

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

Use Cases

Improve UX, Adoption & Productivity

• Collect real-time feedback, review it in the context of recorded sessions, and take prompt action.

• Engage and motivate employees by making their challenges visible and actionable.

• Identify areas of wasted time or unnecessary friction.

Accelerate Complaint Resolution

• Replay exactly what a user did before an issue occurred—without back-and-forth.

• Provide faster fixes and reduce MTTR (mean time to resolution).

Boost Operational Efficiency

• Identify workflow gaps, inefficiencies, or technology slowdowns.

• Surface where visitors couldn’t find what they were looking for.

• Detect and resolve backend or frontend technology issues.

Increase Conversions

• Analyze drop-offs to optimize conversion funnels.

• Reach out with targeted offers based on GermainUX-identified interests.

• Discover why visitors don’t complete orders.

• Uncover missed sales opportunities (e.g., failed or ineffective chat interactions).

• Shorten the time to complete transactions (e.g., in eCommerce) by eliminating workflow blockers.

Workspace

The millisecond-precise, AI-powered session replay workspace consolidates controls, insights, and technical details in a single view.

• Upper Section (Replay Controls)
  Control playback, adjust speed, and search within sessions.

• Right Section (Event Details)
  Displays recorded events, AI-generated insights, and six heatmaps/overlays.

• Bottom Section (Developer Tools)
  Technical deep-dive, including:

  • Console: Captures JavaScript errors, warnings, and logs.
    

    

  • Info: Metadata such as session ID, user, browser details, etc.
    

    

  • Network: Lists HTTP requests and responses triggered during the session.
    

    

  • Timeline: Chronological list of collected facts and events.
    

    

Insights (Automated & Pre-Configured)

Let’ss now review the type of insights GermainUX provides.

Activity & Inactivity

Detect when a user is actively browsing versus idle or distracted.

AI-Driven Session Summaries

Automatically generate concise session summaries, highlighting:

• Key user actions

• Points of friction

• Behavioral insights

This reduces the need to manually replay sessions while retaining the full context. Summaries can be customized per use case.

Behavior & Journey Visualization

Visualize the entire user journey across applications and channels:

• Focused Flow Portlet (2024.2+): Driven by clicks, process data, story beats, or custom metrics (e.g., Shopify Pixels).
  

  

• Flow Portlet (≤2024.1): Driven by clicks or process data.
  

  

Business Impact at Scale

Germain automatically identifies the highest-impact UX issues across millions of sessions, surfacing:

• Frictions in behavior, workflow, and technology

• Conversion bottlenecks

• Critical errors and slowdowns

Dashboards (Aggregate, Pivot, Drill-Through, RCA) present insights at both macro and micro levels.

Example of a custom dashboard that reports UX insights at scale in real time:

Business Process Details

• Blue icons in Session Replay highlight monitored business-process (BP) steps.

• Track when each step occurs, how long it takes, and how effectively users complete it.

More details on how to configure a business process. can be found here.

Errors (User-Visible & Hidden)

• Seen by Users: Errors directly impacting user experience are tagged as “User Errors.”
  

  

• Not Seen by Users: Browser or backend errors that occur invisibly are still captured and analyzed.
  

  

Feedback (NPS)

• Real-time popup collects NPS-style feedback during sessions.

• Each response is tied to the associated replay for root-cause validation.

• Aggregated feedback reports highlight widespread issues.
  
  More details about the Real User Feedback popup are provided below.

Heatmaps / Overlays

Six types of heatmaps reveal where users engage most and where they struggle, either at the session level or across all sessions.

Learn more about configuring and utilizing heatmaps in Germain UX.

Additional Insights

Browser Info

See all the other browser-level insights GermainUX detects and analyzes in real time

Browser Position

GermainUX helps you understand how users position their browsers on desktops, laptops, and mobile devices.

Custom Insight/Tab

Create a custom tab to quickly surface what matters in a user’s session.

Example: a “Sold Out” custom tab appears on all Session Replays where a shopper attempted to purchase an out-of-stock product.

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

Cursor

Real cursor movements, clicks, and text inputs are replayed.

Dead Click

Ineffective clicks are automatically flagged.

Freezes

JavaScript long tasks (browser freezes) are automatically detected.

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

Input

Real-time recording of user inputs (e.g., mouse clicks and keystrokes) during testing or analysis provides an accurate playback of user interactions.

Key Press

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

Load Time

Actual web page load times are captured and can be replayed—useful for A/B testing and other analyses. Percentiles are computed automatically to surface the biggest performance issues and filter out outliers.

Mouse Click

Mouse clicks and touch interactions are recorded and replayed.

Multi-Tab and Multi-Window

Every browser tab a user opens within the authorized/monitored application is recorded by GermainUX; other tabs are not recorded.

Native Popup

Ability to monitor native popups. Replication of the behavior and appearance of any popup is often critical to understanding UX.

No Search Results

Queries returning empty results (e.g., “blue pants”) are flagged for analysis.

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

Users can annotate replays, share comments, and assign to teammates. More details about Notes.

Rage Click

Rapid, repeated clicks highlight frustration.

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

Segmentation

GermainUX provides a wide range of preconfigured segmentation options, with the ability to define your own depending on your monitored application. Segments help you analyze behavior, adoption, and performance by user attributes and contexts.

Behavioral Segmentation

• Usage frequency

• User status (new vs. returning)

Customer Journey Segmentation

Requires one or more Business Processes configured in GermainUX.

• 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

Requires some configuration depending on the monitored application.

• Country

• Region

• City

Needs-Based Segmentation

• Product/service preferences

• Problem-solving needs

• Desired features and functionalities

Technology Segmentation

• Device type (mobile, desktop, tablet)

• Operating system

• Browser type

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

Transactional Segmentation

• Purchase history

• Average order value

• Payment methods

• Frequency of purchases

• Time since last purchase

More details on preconfigured segmentation KPIs and campaign mappings available upon request.

Selection

GermainUX captures every interaction with dropdown lists, menus, and text inputs.

Static Resources Versioning

This feature versions static resources such as CSS, JavaScript, and images to ensure the correct versions are always loaded. This is essential for maintaining a consistent, reliable, and functional user experience.

KPIs, Measures & Pivots

GermainUX provides a mix of preconfigured insights while allowing full customization to match your business needs.

• ~20 KPIs

• ~140 measures

• ~50 pivots

These metrics give you a comprehensive toolkit to analyze user experience, adoption, and performance at scale.

In addition to the out-of-the-box set, you can:

• Create your own KPIs and measures.

• Work with GermainUX’s team to configure custom pivots.

Search Capabilities

Search Across and Within Sessions
Germain’s search mechanism helps you find issues at scale. It works both within a session and across sessions, so you don’t need to open thousands of recordings to identify which sessions experienced a problem.

All metadata and business data captured by Germain are 100% searchable—manually or automatically. When a search result is found, a blue bar highlights the relevant section of the session, helping you quickly locate where the match occurs. You can search for specific events, interactions, or attributes within recorded sessions.

Automated Search

Most critical aspects of the User Journey are automatically analyzed by GermainUX. Automated search works by defining KPIs, which Germain monitors continuously.
More details on preconfigured or custom KPI.

Search Across All User Sessions

Germain allows you to search across millions of session replays for insights (issues, errors, business data, etc.). This makes it possible to quantify the impact of an issue without manually watching sessions.

Example: A Germain user searches across all sessions for every user who viewed or interacted with “Petunia.” Similar searches can be run for error messages, order numbers, organization names, and more.

Search Within a Single Session

Search results are recursive: you can start from a drill-through dashboard, then dive into a specific session while still seeing your search highlights (blue bar). This helps you pinpoint where in the session a string, error, or data value appears.

Automated & Custom Tabs

For searches that are frequent or business-critical, you can pin/automate them for quick access. One approach is to create a Custom Tab, making these searches available to all GermainUX users.

More details on custom tab.

Saved Filters

If you often run the same search across thousands of sessions, save it as a Filter. This ensures it’s easily reusable, without recreating it each time.

Example of saved filter:

More details on Filters.

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