Learn / Guides / Recordings guide
4 session recordings case studies
Recordings can help in a variety of ways: from spotting quick UX fixes to finding errors that cause huge drops in conversions, here is a collection of case studies and examples to help you see their true potential.
Last updated
2 Feb 2022
Start session recordings on your website
Sign up for a free Hotjar account, add the tracking code to your site and start using session recordings today.
1. Spotting an easy-to-miss mobile issue
The context: the team at Plutio replayed session recordings from mobile traffic to make sure the experience was consistent with the desktop one.
What recordings revealed: one of the session replays showed a user trying to close a mobile menu, but accidentally tapping the main logo, which resulted in an unintended page refresh:
The results: this was an easy-to-fix but problematic error for Plutio, because users were being returned to the homepage incessantly when they didn’t want to. After spotting the problem, simply moving the mobile menu improved UX on the page instantly.
2. A quick UX fix that saved sign-ups
The context: when Audiense’s Head of Product noticed a sudden drop-off on the sign-up page, they went straight to recordings to understand what was happening.
What recordings revealed: after just a handful of sessions, the Audiense team saw that the password validator feature was broken on the sign-up form—which meant that people could not finalize their sign-up process. This, in turn, had caused conversions to plummet.
The results: the team fixed the bug within hours and brought conversions back to life. But it didn’t end there: whenever releasing a new feature, the Audiense team now make a point of watching around 100-300 sessions and taking notes, to spot not only bugs but also opportunities for improvement.
3. Using recordings + heatmaps to increase conversion rate
The context: the UX team at Software as a Service (SaaS) platform CCV Shop generates leads through landing pages, and they used recordings and heatmaps together to increase conversions.
What recordings revealed: after using heatmaps to understand the larger context of on-page behavior, the team reviewed recordings to find smaller bugs and issues they needed to fix.
The results: using data from both heatmaps and recordings, the team was able to A/B test changes, and implement successful variations. A few rounds of optimization led to a +38% in conversion rate on their marketing website, from 1.3% to 1.8%—extremely close to their 2% conversion goal.
4. Fixing issues when replatforming 10,000 users
The context: the team at Intelliquip had been working on a new registration portal for a client. On go-live day, they needed to make sure everything worked properly as the platform switch was going to affect nearly 10,000 users.
What recordings revealed: after the first 600 or so users got onboarded, support calls started coming through. The team immediately jumped on watching Hotjar recordings and noticed a huge failure path: users who did not read the instructions provided didn't realize they had to confirm their email to progress and just kept getting stuck in an endless loop.
The results: with data from recordings, Intelliquip could make changes to the code almost on the fly, redeploy, watch, and start again until the process was error-free. In the end, all remaining users were onboarded successfully after a final change was pushed to live.
