About Insights Session Playback

Last Updated September 16, 2024

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Brief Overview

Session Playback helps you understand your users' experiences like never before. Not only can you analyze a user's every click, scroll, input, and other action on your website, but you can go a step further by watching an accurate video-like re-creation of a user's actual experience (a user session).

A session re-creation is not a video recording, but a highly accurate simulation made possible by the data collected by Session Playback Collection. In the Insights Session Playback page, you can watch sessions that already occurred or peak inside users' sessions.

With Session Playback, you can capture, analyze, and playback entire user sessions to identify the user interface pitfalls, streamline bug reporting, and reduce help desk and Support team overhead.

Read more about the new Session Playback infrastructure.

Use Cases

Session Playback use cases include the following:

• See first-hand how your users engage with your website.
• Drill deeper into Funnel drop-off points to learn why users are not completing flows in your website.
• Better understand where and why your users get frustrated with your website.
• Improve your Support team's resolution time and quality by providing them with re-creations of your users' sessions.
• Understand and improve the following action items:
  • Onboarding
  • Feature adoption
  • Conversion rate

How it Works

When Session Playback Collection is enabled on your website, Insights begins collecting additional user data on all pages on which WalkMe is available, and organizes the data into distinct user sessions. 

Each session is turned into a highly accurate simulation which can be viewed just like a recording. Session Playback recreates user sessions with near-perfect accuracy because Session Playback Collection captures everything that occurs in the web browser's Document Object Model (DOM) and saves copies of all assets that comprise a web page's appearance.

Each session is tagged by WalkMe Event, Tracked Event, Analytics Properties, and other filtering mechanisms, allowing you to easily filter through and jump into sessions wherever it makes sense for you. Sessions may be further tagged by adding individual time-stamped notes to the sessions' timeline.

To improve collaboration, sessions may be shared via a URL link.

Tip Tuesday Video

Viewing Your Sessions On The Sessions Page

The Insights Session Playback page is where you can filter through and view your captured sessions. Learn more about the Playback Session page in the Sessions Playback Page Breakdown section below.

Creating Saved Filters

WalkMe Insights features a powerful filtering engine that makes session filtering possible.  Learn more about filtering sessions and creating saved filters.

Configuring Session Storage and Security

Sessions are encrypted and stored on Amazon AWS. They are stored for one year by default.

Insights only track the activity on websites on which WalkMe is installed. You can limit data collection using Traffic Management settings to identify specific groups in your organization that should be excluded.

Learn more about Insights' data censorship mechanism.

Understanding Session Playback Data Capture and What Can Be Played Back

The following list summarizes the Session Playback data collected by Insights:

• HTML snapshots (in video-like format)
• Input fields (if explicitly configured)
• Focus in/out of fields
• Mouse position
• Changes to visible elements
• Page scroll
• Text selection
• Media playback
• Page size

And, as a result, the following assets can be recorded and played back:

• HTML and CSS (and all basic web page and app elements)
• CSS animations
• Vector graphics in SVG (including animations)
• Hover cursors and effects
• Embedded <iframe>s
• Script-modified input values
• Window resizing events
• AJAX URL navigation
• HTML5 <audio> and <video> playback
• Multi-touch events (on mobile devices)

Supported Browsers

Session Playback is supported on the following web browsers:

• Internet Explorer 11 and above
• Edge
• Chrome
• Firefox
• Safari 8 and above

Enabling Session Playback

You can enable Session Playback in your Editor settings menu:

Session Playback Page Breakdown

The Insights Session Playback page provides all of your Session Playback Collection information, as well as the ability to watch accurate re-creations of the sessions if you've enabled Session Playback Collection.

1. Filters and Date Pickers
   • a) Filters:
     1. The filter drop-down contains every Saved Filter defined in the Sessions page.
     2. The data shown on every report on this page relates to the chosen filter.
   • b) Date Picker: Likewise, The data shown on every report in this page relates to the chosen date range.
   • Note

     In the session playback page, the date picker filters on the time the Session was closed (the last event of the session). So some sessions that started in the date picker time range but ended outside of it, could be missed.

2. Session Data
   • a) Filtered Session Count: Shows the total count of Session Playbacks captured by the filter you've set in the Filter and Date Picker section(This filter will only return sessions with a "start date" that falls under the selected time range).
   • b) Date Column: Shows the date and time (UTC) on which a given session was recorded.
   • c) Session Info Column: Shows the session score, duration, and the number of app pages viewed in the session.
   • d) Session Timeline Column:
     • Shows a color-coded, clickable session timeline.
     • Click the play icon to view a session recording from the beginning, or click the timeline to jump to that location in a session recording.
     • Hover over the “?” icon to view the session activity key, enabling you to decode the colors on the timeline.
     • Hover over a colored bar in the timeline to view the different events that occurred within the session.
   • e) User Column:
     • View the username or GUID of the user whose activity the Session Playback is comprised of.
     • Hover over a username or GUID to see the total number of sessions the user has engaged, the ordinal session number (e.g., session # 15 / 20 total sessions) this Session Playback represents, and date this user was first seen.
   • f) Device Column:
     • Shows the browser type and operating system the user was on during this session.
     • Hover over a browser-OS icon pair to see the browser resolution, browser version, and the name of the OS. (Starting lib version XXX Resolution is not supported anymore).

Once you click the play icon to play an individual session, you will be taken to the Session Playback page:

1. Sessions' User Info
   • User identifier as was reported to Insights. In this image it's "user@walkme.com".
     • Pro-Tip: Clicking on the user identifier will show every session this user has in Insights.
   • User session count. In this case, 'user@walkme.com' visited the platform 36 times and this is the 36th visit.
   • Session date
2. Home shortcut
3. Session Tools 
   • Share session
     • Once clicked, Insights will generate a public link to view this session (and this session only).
     • To disable this link, click again and choose to revoke link.
   • Similar Sessions
     • Using heuristics, Insights will locate other users that behave similarly to this user.
4. Session Transcript
   • Number of page views in this session
   • The number of actions in this session, including the following:
     • Click
     • Page view
     • Input change
     • JavaScript exceptions
     • Custom Events
     • WalkMe Events
   • Transcript tile represents an event that occurred during the session, and it contains the following:
     • Icon: Event icon
     • Title: Event name
     • Sub-Title: Event summary
     • "i": Additional event information
     • Pro-Tips: 
       • During session replay, the transcript is synced to the timeline (#7 in this list).
       • The transcript is interactive; click it to rewind or fast forward.
5. Player Address Bar
   • Pro-Tip: Clicking the URL will open the URL in a new tab.
6. Sessions' Device Info
   • Device type
   • Browser type
   • OS type
   • Pro-Tip: Use hover to see more details.
7. Session Timeline
   • Pro-Tips: 
     • The timeline is interactive. Click it to rewind or fast forward.
     • Every mark on the timeline represents an event from the transcript (#4 on this list).
8. Player Controllers
   1. Play/pause toggle
   2. Activity time counter
      • Pro-Tips: 
        • The time in this counter is calculated out of total activity time (total time minus idle time).
        • Live sessions will show the activity tile counter only after the session is closed.
9. Play Speed
10. Full Screen

Session Score - How is it calculated?

A session score takes into account multiple variables related to the session:

• Amount of clicks
• Amount of URL visited
• Amount of input field interactions
• Total length of inactivity
• Time from now (how old the session is)

All these factors and taken and then calculated into a number, the higher the number the more "relevant" the session is.

Filters

Session Playback features a powerful filtering engine. Learn more about filtering sessions in What Are Filters and How Are They Used?

Technical Notes

• With Session Playback enabled, publishing content in the Production environment will trigger the running of Session Playback