Watching session replays without a system is inefficient. You’ll spend a lot of time observing normal behavior and miss the moments that actually matter. Here’s a structured approach to reviewing session recordings.
Start with a Specific Goal
Before watching anything, decide what you’re evaluating:
- Are you focused on monetization or conversion?
- Do you define success by purchase, signup, or some other action?
- Are you investigating a specific drop in metrics?
Your goal determines which sessions to watch and what behavior to pay attention to. If you’re evaluating checkout conversion, you probably don’t need to spend much time on sessions that never reach the cart.
Segregate Sessions by Length
Short sessions (under 10 seconds) and bounce sessions can be insightful, but they require different analysis. A user who lands and immediately leaves is telling you something different than a user who browses for five minutes.
For this guide, we’re focusing on sessions longer than 30 seconds—users who engaged with your product in some meaningful way before leaving or converting.
Map Out the Broad Journey
Before analyzing specific interactions, understand the overall shape of the session. Trace the user’s path through your product:
- Home page → product search → product detail page → add to cart → back to search → checkout
- Or: Home page → category browse → product detail → exit
Once you’ve mapped the journey, try to classify the user’s intent:
- Does the user seem intent on purchasing? (Direct navigation, adding items to cart, proceeding to checkout)
- Are they just exploring? (Browsing multiple categories, not adding anything to cart)
- Are they comparison shopping? (Viewing similar products repeatedly, checking prices)
The intent shapes how you interpret everything else. A user who seems ready to buy but abandons checkout is a different problem than a user who was never going to purchase in this session.
Watch Behavior Within Each Segment
Once you understand the journey, look more closely at what happens within each page or step:
- What elements does the user click, and in what order?
- Do they return to a page shortly after leaving it?
- Do they click the same item multiple times?
- What do they type in search boxes or form fields?
- Do they scroll past important content without seeing it?
- Do they hover over elements without clicking?
This is where patterns start to emerge. If multiple users click a non-clickable element, that’s a design problem. If users repeatedly search for products that exist but can’t find them, your search may be underperforming.
Identify Critical Moments
Look for points where the user’s progress toward their goal stalls or stops:
- Is the checkout process confusing? Do users hesitate or backtrack?
- Do they struggle with specific inputs like size selectors or date pickers?
- If the user is exploring, do they seem lost—revisiting the same pages multiple times without progressing?
- Do they abandon forms partway through?
- Do they click something and then immediately click away, suggesting the result wasn’t what they expected?
These friction points are where improvements will have the most impact.
What Humans Miss
Even careful reviewers miss things. Some details are too small to catch when you’re watching a session at normal speed:
- A click target that’s slightly too small, causing occasional misclicks
- Confusing copy that makes users hesitate
- Layout issues that only affect certain viewport sizes
- Patterns that only appear across dozens of sessions
This is why we built Locus. It analyzes user behavior in the context of all page content—every button, label, and layout element—so it can identify problems that would take a human hours to spot. When Locus flags a session, you can watch it knowing there’s something specific worth seeing.