We’ve all heard the famous saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” But what about videos? Product teams are always looking for ways to truly understand their users—and then build the best products for them. And one of the key tools to achieve this is through visual replay of the user’s in-app experience.

While session replay tools are well-liked, getting buy-in from leadership (or budget approval) isn’t easy. That’s why we put together three great stories about the impact of visual evidence, plus how to address compliance issues.

Real-world stories about the impact of session replay

Session replay is more than just a visual recreation of your user journey. It’s a comprehensive solution that captures user interactions—like clicks, hovers, scrolls—and reconstructs them into a visual narrative of how users navigate the app. This is your window into how users interact with your app as they try to complete tasks.

As part of the Pendo One Platform, you can pair replays with product analysis, user feedback, and other qualitative data to understand What And Why what users do in your app. Here are three real ways to make a positive impact on your business with re-recordings:

1. Uncover UX technical debt

All product staff need to play back the recordings and watch everything carefully to understand the difficulties users are facing.

Here’s an example: Molly, a UX designer at Pendo, discovered that users were struggling with the date range selection feature. When he watched the replay with the ‘frustration indicator’ in it, he found that users trying to set a date range in Pendo had to click multiple times to set dates that were far apart. Molly saw this and was embarrassed.

By sharing a replay of this issue in Slack, Molly’s engineering team identified a simple fix. Within two hours, they implemented a solution that significantly improved their UX! Great job, Molly and team!

2. Monitor new feature launches

When you roll out a new feature, replay can answer questions like:

• Are people using the feature as you envisioned, or are users experiencing obstacles—like bugs you didn’t catch in testing?
• Are users following the ‘happy path’ you have in mind? Are they using this feature in unexpected ways? Or do they actually quit and go somewhere else?
• What types of customers or personas are successful, and which ones are struggling?

When Pendo launched AI-powered Suggested Replays, initial metrics were conflicting: Usage data was low, but user feedback (collected through Listen) was positive. Our quantitative and qualitative metrics were helpful in telling us that something was wrong, but we didn’t know what was wrong.

Our product team watched replays of users visiting the replay library and discovered something surprising: 70-80% of users experienced a blank state instead of the recommended replay! This guides our next product iteration, and we should use three types of product data to guide our roadmap forward.

3. Validate product investment

In one customer conversation, a product manager shared that his leadership team wanted to focus on releasing new features. However, he knew that wasn’t the right direction based on his user research and adoption metrics. He showed those metrics to leadership, but they didn’t change.

After watching the replay, he quickly found visual evidence that he needed to reject: Users were stuck in separate sections of the product and spent about 80% of their time in the app flipping between two pages.

Equipped with replay clips and product usage statistics like total time on page, its leadership team reprioritized their entire roadmap! Now, they are focused on cut user time on this workflow by 30%.

Facing compliance and privacy issues?

We’re focused on giving you the right privacy and security options for your replay data, so you can do the right thing yours users and companies.

Privacy and data security are common objections to session replay tools, which is why Pendo Session Replay lets you enable the right type of privacy for your needs:

1. Maximum privacy. If your product handles a lot of personally identifiable information (PII), you may choose to block as much data as possible. That way, when Pendo recreates the session, you see the star as a replacement and the data is not passed to Pendo (or you).
2. Just input. If the user only enters PII where they type information, this level of security blocks what the user types so you can still see the navigation and top bar.
3. Minimal privacy. This level of security is typical for knowledge base websites and articles. Your email, password, and phone number will be hidden, but you will still be able to see other elements of your product’s user interface (UI).

Once you select a privacy option, you can choose to make it more (or less) detailed. You can also choose which user replays you want to record by using our segmentation engine to capture specific user sessions and exclude the rest.

Expert tips for getting more out of session replays

If you’re not sure how to start using replay in your everyday workflow, look no further. The following best practices will help you get the most out of your replay recordings:

1. Prepare saved filters

First things first, open the library and set up some saved filters in the product area or page/feature you are actively working on. It will contain some suggestions on areas you should pay attention to, so you can start watching replays to determine what level your CX is. Then, you can proactively identify some quick wins you can make to improve your product.

2. Contextualize insights

Set up a dashboard that includes saved filters so you can track quality, quantity, and visuals all in one place.

For future feature rollouts and investments, you should set up Analytics funnels and Data Explorer (DX) reports, and launch replays from there to see experiences in the context of important data.

3. Share replays with other teams

Many customers have had success bringing replay into their weekly meetings with engineering and Go To Market (GTM) teams. Open saved filters during the weekly meeting and watch some live replays so everyone can see what they’ve just been working on for weeks, in the wild!

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This post is a recap of our latest webinar, Watch and win—how you can use Session Replay to build better products. Take a self-guided tour of Pendo Session Replay, or talk to an expert for a live demo.