Tools for user session recordings

It is very important to keep in mind the user experience within the web when developing the design and functionality of a website. For that, it is important that the elements are easily recognizable and that the design is very intuitive so that the user reaches the intended goal.

It’s necessary to always start from a basic design, but you have to make modifications to the design based on the data obtained from the web.

Initially, the most often used tools are monitoring tools, such as Google Analytics, Piwic or Omniture, among others. In addition to these tools, which specialize in measurement, there are other web analytics tools, specialized in session recording and website heatmaps.

Some of these tools are Crazy Egg, HotJar, and Yandex metrics. Although the last one does not specialize in it directly, it’s free unlike the first two, so it can be a good alternative if we have no investment capacity.

Crazy Egg is a user-behavior tool, it allows us to see interesting data in the form of heatmaps, data such as the places where the user makes more clicks, scroll analysis, A/B tests, and user session recordings.

It’s a very powerful tool used by different professionals, which is able to connect to Google Analytics to import data and improve reports.

The problem with this tool is that it only has paid versions, so it is quite difficult to see if it really is the tool you need before investing money. The only way to know is to ask a person that has used it before so he can either recommend you to use it or use another tool.

Luckily, the smallest package is not too expensive, it’s rather limited though, but you get enough to have a generic idea of the tool.

HotJar  is a powerful tool for analytics that allows you, among many other things, to record user sessions and generate heatmaps.

Despite being a paid tool, it has a demo version so you can test the tool and see if it really meets the needs the company needs to cover.

The main focus of this tool is user experience, so it has other interesting features such as form analysis (most of the time, the analytics team have to do all sort of things to get this information as they don’t have the necessary tools) or a quite interesting one: the possibility to recruit test users to test the modifications on your website and provide feedback about them.

Is the Russian Analytics par excellence. Google has a strong competitor in Russian-speaking countries, it’s called Yandex, it has various tools that have the same functions as those from Google, including Yandex metrica , that’s basically the same as Analytics but with some variations.

One of them is session recording which allows you to watch how the user moved within your website. It also gives you different data, such as the browser used, the source from which the user came from, and other things.

The tool has a capacity limit for the sessions recorded, so it’s quite convenient to continuously check the information. We recommend this tool for small websites that don’t receive many visits.

Also, please note that some recordings have re-play problems as the tool sometimes fails to interpret the website code. Even so, it’s still a free alternative to the first two, so if you can’t afford either of the first two, this is quite a good option.

To be honest, to record user sessions, we recommend you to try different tools to see which one is the most suited to your business needs.

HotJar, at first glance, seems to have much more interesting capabilities than Crazy Egg, but it is recommended to try both of them before making a final decision.

As we have said before if you don’t have a big budget, Yandex metrica is the safe choice, it’s a less powerful alternative, but it’s free and has some interesting features.

Images | Each of the above tools.

Header photo | Fotolia