Introducing Recordings

Imagine you’re running an A/B test on your online checkout flow to improve conversion rates. All the right metrics are up, except one of your guardrail metrics: even though overall conversion has improved, your cart abandonment rate has increased significantly.

This used to mean days of debugging and guesswork: sifting through analytics data and trying to reproduce the issue to form a hypothesis; coming up with a fix and launching a new experiment to test it.

Today, we’re launching a better way to investigate and fix: learning from actual users of your application through Session Recordings in Confidence.

#Metrics tell you what, recordings tell you why

Session Recordings is our take on recording and playing back what happens in your app. It’s integrated with the Confidence platform, so session recordings live alongside your flags, experiments, and release history. Recordings add a new dimension to the experimentation rigor and insights you already know and love in Confidence so you (or your agent) can reply and learn from actual users of your application.

Let’s return to your rising cart abandonment rate. Now, instead of manually assembling data and making guesses to get at a cause and solution, you can review actual sessions of users in your experiment from the platform where you implemented it. When you ask the Confidence Agent to find bottlenecks, it tells you there’s a field obstructing a checkout button on a subset of mobile browsers.

Now all you have to do is deploy a fix, restart the experiment, and ship.

#Start using Recordings today

Recordings are available to all Confidence users in the new Recordings tab:

#Getting set up

There are two steps to get started. Your agent can take care of the first one:

1. Install and configure the new SDK
2. Set up a recording policy that decides what to record and when

Confidence will begin recording, and your list of sessions will start to populate.

You can also tweak privacy settings further. Confidence Recording SDK protects your user’s personal information by default by masking all inputs out of the box. You can apply further masking or blocking yourself on other components depending on exact specifics of your site.

#Reviewing recordings

Your users will generate a lot of recordings. You probably only want to binge-watch some of them, so we let you hand off most of the work to your agent.

When recordings land in Confidence, the Confidence Agent watches them, transcribes them, and identifies learnings, bugs, and opportunities to improve. When the agent flags a finding, such as a bug, you can click through to the exact timestamp to observe it yourself. You can also explore all of your recordings by filtering for actions that matter to you (like errors) or searching semantically through transcripts.

Recordings are accessible to the rest of Confidence through the Confidence Agent. You can query for experiments and relevant recordings, and the agent will bring them into the relevant chat.

If that sounds like your jam, grab some popcorn*, check out Confidence Recordings, grab some popcorn*, and start gathering actionable, qualitative data on how real users use your apps today.

*Popcorn is not currently included in Confidence Recordings.