Sprig’s Guide to Session Replays

Contents

What is Session Replay?

Session Replay vs Sprig Replays

Who Can Benefit from Replays?

How Sprig Replays Improves the Product Experience

How to Select the Right Session Replay Tool

Job Functions That Benefit From Session Replay

Sprig Replays: The Key to Unlocking the User Journey

Sprig Replays Integrations

Sprig Replay vs. Competitors

FAQs

What is Session Replay?

Session replay is a visual tool that captures a user’s real time interactions with your product.

The tool lets you virtually peer over a user’s shoulder while they’re interacting with your product to see clicking, scrolling, form inputs, mouse movements and more. It’s an easy way to understand how users navigate through your website or product, identify friction points, and uncover opportunities for improvement.

Many product insights companies offer a session replay solution. With many of these solutions though, the researcher will need to watch the entire session, which can be a time-consuming endeavor.

‍

What are Sprig Replays?

Sprig Replay software records short clips of user interactions on websites and mobile apps. Sprig’s advanced targeting capabilities let you pinpoint and record user sessions based on specific events, such as actions taken within the product. This makes it easy to zoom in on specific user groups and precisely track their engagement.

Session Replay versus Sprig Replays: What’s the Difference?

Session replay reconstructs entire user sessions by capturing changes to the Document Object Model (DOM) and interface. They piece together these changes to recreate user sessions in a representation format.

Sprig Replays captures clips of users’ interactions with your product instead of the entire session. That means you don’t need to spend hours watching footage. You can target certain points in the user journey to see exactly what users love and what still needs some work.

‍

When Should Teams Use Session Replay or Sprig Replays?

Session replay software offers insight into usability issues, user preferences, and areas for improvement within your product interface. By analyzing session replays, you can find ways to enhance the overall user experience.

While still capturing user events like traditional session replays, Sprig goes several steps further by giving you just as much information in less time.

Sprig Replays can also be paired with Sprig’s in-product Surveys. With this combination, you get users’ feedback about your product while they’re using it, along with a clip that gives context to their responses.

This granular level of analysis helps you make changes that address exactly what’s important to your users.

Sprig Replays Case Study: GoFormz

GoFormz is a small company (50-100 employees) that offers an online and mobile forms solution to enable businesses to easily create and fill out forms.

Brice works on a product team of eight who are tasked with building for their wide ranging audience of businesses across dozens of verticals.

When working to build for their audience, the product team realized that while they were meeting the needs of a louder, core audience - there was a quieter group that was harder to reach.

“We weren’t sure what this smaller, less vocal audience wanted in the product or what their pain points were,” said Brice.

Their product team used Sprig targeted in-product Surveys to understand what this smaller audience needed. They first asked very broad questions about satisfaction and then used event data to target a subset of the audience with more specific questions.

By running surveys, the product team was able to use the real-time feedback to improve their product experience, including building a brand new onboarding process and updating the template building experience.

They were also able to analyze cancellations by running an in-product survey to users who were dropping out to understand their reasons for leaving.

“We’ve probably made hundreds of improvements to our platform by using Sprig surveys,” said Brice.

With Sprig Replays, the company really started to change how they release products.

By targeting their key audiences for launches with Replays, GoFormz was able to improve the way they release products

Instead of relying on A/B testing - which can be time-consuming - the product team used Replays to analyze people using new feature releases to see if they are taking the right steps. This data allowed the team to quickly know if a new feature was serving users.

Learn more at https://sprig.com/customers/goformz.

Who Can Benefit from a Session Replay Tool?

Designers, web developers, marketing teams — just about anyone involved in creating or improving digital products can benefit from the insights session replay tools provide. This type of software helps you fine-tune ideas and changes based on user interactions. Whether your product is geared toward selling goods or services, session replays keep your team focused on delivering a better user experience.

‍

Who Can Benefit from the Sprig Replays Tool?

Sprig Replays, along with Surveys and AI Analysis, are designed to bring together UX researchers and product managers towards a common goal.

Sprig Replays enables UX researchers to capture user insights faster than ever before. They can quickly collect and analyze short session clips to inform product decisions. It also enables product managers to analyze clips to identify product opportunities and boost conversion, retention and satisfaction.

Seven Ways Sprig Replays Improve the Product Experience

1. Solve bugs faster

See exactly what’s complicating your users’ experience. Sprig Replays give you a clear visual representation of user interactions, making it easier and faster for you to identify, reproduce, and fix bugs. By observing how users navigate through your product interface, you’ll pinpoint the precise steps that led to the issue.
‍

2. Optimize conversion rates

A customer was so close to completing a purchase on your website. What caused them to abandon checkout? Take a look at a Sprig Replays clip. It’ll show you the exact moment they hesitated or encountered an issue. From there, you can create a more user-friendly process and refine your messaging to craft a seamless user experience.
‍

3. Better support customers

A customer can try to explain a problem, but when you can see the issue, you know exactly what you need to fix. A visual representation gives you some additional context. This clear visual insight empowers you to address the issue effectively and efficiently, ensuring a smoother user experience.

With Sprig Replays, there are no guessing games. Instead, you can watch real-time interactions to understand what customers are experiencing. This way, you can focus more time and resources on solving user problems instead of trying to detect them.
‍

4. Understand the user experience

Get a better view of what users like and dislike about your product. With a full view of customer behavior, Sprig Replays makes it possible to see where users are drawn to and the areas that need more attention. This helps you better understand your customers and what’s most important to them. From there, you can tailor your product to better meet their needs and improve customer satisfaction.
‍

5. Improve onboarding

Make sure new hires have a positive experience with your company from the moment they start working with you. As users navigate the onboarding process, Sprig Replays can play back any areas of confusion or friction in the onboarding flow. You’ll see where users hesitate, backtrack, encounter difficulties, or lose interest in completing key onboarding tasks. Use this information to create an easier and more engaging onboarding process.
‍

6. Understand the user journey

Sprig Replays give you views of interactions throughout the user journey. This includes initial interactions with your product and extends to conversion or churn. You can better understand user behaviors and how your customers move through every stage of their experience with your product.
‍

7. Identify and address accessibility issues

See how users with different abilities interact with your digital interface. By reviewing Replays clips, you can identify accessibility barriers that hinder some users from effectively navigating and interacting with your website or application.

Unclear navigation pathways, too little contrast between text and background colors, or inaccessible form fields reflect in Replays clips as hesitation or confusion within user behaviors. Addressing these accessibility issues enhances your product for everyone.

How to Select the Right Session Replay Tool

When looking for the perfect tool to understand the user experience, it's important to weigh your options. Evaluate the features each product offers, and determine whether they align with your specific requirements.

Here are 5 criteria that you can use to evaluate a tool:

Segmentation and Filtering
When you have thousands of recorded user sessions, finding the right one can be a challenge. The ability to search, filter, or segment sessions based on specific events or criteria is crucial to gain insights from session replays. Not all tools offer these capabilities, so check if the vendor allows you to pinpoint sessions that meet your needs.
‍
Advanced Targeting
Select a tool - like Sprig Replays - which allows you to run a replay connected to a survey or event so that you can capture a short clip. This will allow you to review and analyze results quickly.
‍
Identifying Sessions by User
Session replay tools differ in their ability to identify specific users in recordings. If you need to link sessions to individual users, ensure the tool allows for this level of identification. This feature is valuable for resolving customer support issues and analyzing user behavior.
‍
Implementation Complexity
The implementation process for session replay tools can vary from simple to complex. Some tools require only a few lines of code, while others involve more extensive setup and configuration. Consider the resources and time available for implementation when choosing a tool.
‍
Cost
Session replay tools vary in price depending on factors like data retention, the number of sessions recorded, and additional features. Evaluate your budget and determine which tool offers the best value for your needs. Keep in mind that the cheapest option may not always be the most suitable in terms of functionality and performance.

Job Functions That Benefit From Session Replays

Product Management

Session replays provide an up-close view of what’s going right and wrong with a product from the user perspective. Product management teams use session replays to see where users are struggling. This insight makes it easy to determine where to focus efforts for product improvement.

Design and User Experience (UX) Research

Designers and UX researchers use session replay tools to gain insights into how users interact with their sites. Designers can dissect session replays to scrutinize every aspect of design, from the layout and navigation to the visual hierarchy.

A large part of UX research involves examining user feedback from all angles. Session replays allow these teams to access on-demand visual recordings of user interactions. This allows them to test their design theories and find any usability issues that are blocking user engagement and affecting conversions.

Customer Support

When users come across problems or have questions, support agents can review session replays to visualize the actions that led to the reported issues. By looking at the exact behaviors that preceded the problem, support agents can quickly understand the context and determine the root cause. Replays also allow support teams to replicate user issues faster and easier so the team can test and resolve problems in a timely manner.

Sprig Replays: The Key to Unlocking the User Journey

Capture targeted sessions

Maximize your team’s time, and get the most out of user interactions with Sprig Replays. You can hone in on specific user groups to get the insights that are most relevant to your goals. Once you’ve set specific criteria, Sprig automatically triggers a recording after users take certain actions within your product.

Even after the recording starts, you can set Replays to record up to five minutes before or after the trigger. This way, you won’t miss any important details, and you'll get all the context you need to make informed decisions and improve the user experience.
‍

View users’ sessions next to their survey feedback

Sprig Replays go hand-in-hand with Sprig’s in-product surveys so you can back up users’ words with their actions. Your customers can share their opinions about your product while their experience is fresh in their mind. Sprig Replays captures their behavior to show you why they gave the responses they did. Now, you have a more complete picture of user feedback.

Dive deeper into the data with AI

Take the guesswork out of analyzing user behavior and let AI do the heavy lifting. Sprig’s AI combs through all your Replay data and identifies patterns and emerging trends in customer behavior.

Another pillar of the Sprig toolkit, Sprig’s AI uses OpenAI’s GPT large language model (LLM) to turn open-text responses from users into valuable and digestible insights about your product. AI Analysis also filters Replays clips based on user attributes and survey responses so you can narrow your focus down to exactly what you want to analyze. This saves you time and provides deeper insights into user interactions.

Install with ease

Adding Sprig to your product is a breeze with its one-time installation process. Embed Sprig into your web or mobile product with a simple one-time installation via Segment, Google Tag Manager, and more.

Sprig Replays API Integrations

Take your product development and user research processes to the next level. With Sprig's Public API and Data Export API integrations, you can retrieve study data and analyze it to read further into user behaviors and preferences.

It takes little effort to send data from your data warehouse or other sources directly into Sprig. You can import people, events, and attributes to enrich your study data and get a deeper understanding of user interactions. Sprig's API integrations allow you to capture a holistic view of user behavior. This creates a seamless process for pulling key information from your users across all phases of product development.

Sprig Replays vs. Competitors

Sprig vs. Hotjar

Sprig and Hotjar both give you an overall sense of user behavior through replays. Sprig, however, also offers advanced targeting that triggers session recordings based on specific user attributes. This means, when you use Sprig, you get more precise data and analysis.

User privacy is another key difference between Sprig and Hotjar. Hotjar uses cookies to track user data, which can raise some privacy concerns among users. Your customers trust you to protect their sensitive data and information, which is why Sprig doesn't use cookies at all. Sprig only looks at the information you choose to share with Sprig so you can give your users more confidence that their data is safe with you.
‍

Sprig vs. FullStory

Sprig’s suite of Replays, in-product surveys, and AI analysis lets you see what users do and why they do it. Alternatively, FullStory focuses more on quantitative data. While this data is beneficial, it leaves out a lot of the context and deeper insights into user behavior that Sprig provides.

Sprig also records user actions right before and after they answer a survey. This gives you a full picture of the customer experience. Unlike FullStory, Sprig offers a free version you can use as long as you like before upgrading to the plan that best fits your company's needs.
‍

Sprig vs. Qualtrics

While customers are using your product, make the most of the time they’re spending on it. Qualtrics primarily focuses on surveys. Sprig, on the other hand, offers a full toolkit designed to simplify your research process. This way, you can see user behavior from all angles.

While Qualtrics often requires extensive engineering time and support, Sprig comes loaded with more than 75 study templates that get you up and running in minutes. When paired with Replays and AI, Sprig gives you the tools you need to effectively research and understand user behavior and preferences.

Frequently Asked Questions:

What is the meaning of a session replay?

Session replay records everything a user does on a website, including clicks, scrolls, and keystrokes, and then shows these actions as a video-like recording or a detailed log.
‍

What does session replays look like?

Session replays look a lot like video recordings. When you play a replay clip, you see a visual reproduction of a user's session with your product. Every action they take is captured and displayed in a chronological sequence.
‍

What are the benefits of session replays?

Whether it’s the moment a user lands on your homepage or their final click during the checkout process, session replays give the viewpoint you need to understand the user journey. Use this information to optimize user flows and enhance the overall usability of your product. This tool also serves customer service teams by giving agents real-life examples of customer interactions so teams can refine their communication and problem-solving skills.
‍

How do I enable Sprig Replays?

Start by installing Sprig into your website or mobile application. Then, select “New Study,” followed by “New Replay.” Choose a delivery platform, then enter the Targeting module to specify the timing, events, and other filters for your replay trigger. Set the number of recordings you want to capture, and click “Launch Replay!”