User Research
Session Recording
A session recording is a replay of one user's journey through a product, capturing their clicks, scrolling, and movements as a video. It lets you watch a single real visit unfold.
Why it matters
Seeing one person hesitate or give up is harder to dismiss than a chart, and it often makes a usability problem suddenly obvious.
In depth
Session recordings reveal exactly where people stumble, but each one is a single story, so they are best for generating hypotheses rather than proving how common a problem is. A common mistake is drawing broad conclusions from a few vivid clips; combine them with heatmaps or analytics to check how widespread an issue really is, and respect user privacy when collecting them.
Real-world example
Watching a recording where someone repeatedly clicks a greyed-out button before leaving shows you a point of confusion a metric alone would miss.
Related terms