Session replay tools like Clarity and Hotjar have become staples in the product toolkit. They promise a window into how users really interact with your product—every drop-off, every rage click, every abandoned cart. But if you’ve ever sat down to watch session recordings, you know the reality: it can feel like staring at security footage, waiting for something interesting to happen.
Most teams have access to session replay but struggle to extract consistent value from it. At
Locus, we specialize in session replay analysis – this is the framework we recommend:
Start with a Specific Goal
Before you open a single recording, ask yourself what you’re trying to learn. Session replay is most powerful when it’s pointed at a specific question:
- Why did conversion drop this quarter?
- Why aren’t users adopting the new feature?
- Why did checkout abandonment spike after the last release?
The goal shapes everything—which sessions you watch, what behaviors you look for, and how you interpret what you see. Without it, you’re just watching people browse. With it, every session becomes evidence.
Focus on Consequential Flows
Once you have a goal, identify the user flows most connected to it:
- Evaluating monetization? Spend your time in the purchase and checkout flow.
- Investigating feature adoption? Watch sessions where users encounter that feature for the first time.
- Debugging a drop in retention? Focus on the first few minutes of returning user sessions.
This seems obvious, but it’s easy to get distracted by interesting but irrelevant behavior. A user struggling with your settings page is worth noting, but if you’re trying to understand why revenue is down, stay focused on the money path.
Quantity Beats Quality
Here’s a counterintuitive truth about session replay: you need to watch a lot of them. Many sessions will look nearly identical—user lands, browses, leaves. That’s fine. You’re not looking for the typical experience; you’re hunting for edge cases and patterns that only emerge at scale.
Some UX issues are pervasive but subtle. A broken click target might frustrate every user, but only a handful will express that frustration in ways visible in replay—rage clicks, repeated attempts, confused mouse movements. If you only watch ten sessions, you might miss it entirely. Watch fifty, and the pattern becomes unmistakable.
Develop Hypotheses, Not Conclusions
When you spot peculiar behavior, resist the urge to immediately conclude you’ve found the problem. Instead, form a hypothesis. A user adding items to their cart but abandoning at checkout could mean many things:
- The total price surprised them
- Unexpected shipping fees changed their calculus
- They were comparison shopping and never intended to buy
- The checkout flow itself was confusing or broken
The same behavior can have very different root causes, and the fix for each would be completely different. Session replay tells you what happened. It rarely tells you why.
Test Your Hypotheses
This is where session replay connects back to the broader product practice. Once you’ve enumerated possible explanations, find ways to validate or eliminate them:
- Add a brief exit survey at checkout
- Run a small experiment (surfacing shipping costs earlier, for instance) and watch for changes in behavior
- Dig into analytics to see if abandonment correlates with cart size or geography
The goal is to move from observation to understanding. Session replay generates hypotheses; everything else in your toolkit helps you test them.
Scale Intelligently
There’s an obvious problem with the “watch lots of sessions” advice: time. If your product generates hundreds or thousands of recordings daily, reviewing them all is neither possible nor a good use of your attention.
This is the challenge we built Locus to solve. Rather than asking you to scrub through endless footage, Locus surfaces the sessions most likely to contain actionable insights. It identifies unusual patterns, highlights moments of friction, and draws preliminary conclusions—so you can spend your time validating findings rather than hunting for them.
Session replay is one of the most underutilized tools in product development, not because teams don’t have access to it, but because the raw footage is overwhelming without a system for extracting signal from noise. Approach it with clear goals, focused attention, and a hypothesis-driven mindset, and it becomes one of the most direct lines you have to understanding your users.