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.
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.
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.
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 (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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Every tab a user opens for browsing the authorized/monitored application is recorded by Germain UX. Other tabs are not recorded by Germain UX.
Selection
Germain UX captures every interaction with dropdown lists, menus, and text.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.
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:
Business Process Analysis on a Flow Graph:
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 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.
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.
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.
Feature Availability: 2022.1 or later