We just released a few new features that will help you:
- Get a better idea of who your end users are and how they interact with your web app
- Make your recorded user sessions time-proof
- Understand when a user is browsing in a different tab
Track individual end user activities
The enriched SessionStack JavaScript API now allows you to retrospectively identify end users. While you could store end user emails and other personal data by explicitly calling the log command for each end user to be able to search this particular user’s sessions, now all you need to do is call the identify command to find a certain user by email, full name or any other user details, and dig deeper in his sessions.
How it works:
When a new visitor gets recorded by SessionStack for the first time, he’s assigned a unique cookie which will be used later on to identify all the sessions initiated by the given user. Since at this point the user is still anonymous, SessionStack will automatically assign a unique ID and name to the user. As soon as you call the identify command, the user will no longer be anonymous and his browsing data will be reconciled with the automatically assigned identifier. Since user recorded sessions are stored, the identification will be applied retrospectively and you’ll be able to see the entire user history since the first time he landed on your web app.
What’s more, user session history can be updated anytime by simply calling the identify command once again.
Know when the user is no longer browsing in your app window
We’ve enhanced the session replay capabilities of SessionStack to show you when the user jumps to another browser tab or minimizes the browser altogether.
To allow users to keep loads of open tabs at the same time, browsers dynamically render only that part of the web app that the user is seeing at the given moment by changing the way JavaScript gets executed.
SessionStack keeps recording your web app even when the user is not in your web app window (he might be browsing in a different tab or might have minimized the browser altogether). When replaying the session, it might look as if there were glitches in your web app but that’s just the result of the way the browser pre-rendered your app pages in the background.
To clear up such misunderstandings, SessionStack now gives you a heads-up when the tab is ‘abandoned’ by the user and when the user is back on it.
Reliable session replay even if your app has changed
Now you can rely on older user sessions without having to worry if your app will be properly displayed because you’ve updated it a few times in the meantime.
Until now SessionStack was making a request to the server for every single static page resource (but the HTML files) in order to replay the session. If, however, your web app changed between the time the user session was recorded and the time you started replaying it (for example, CSS style changes were introduced or an image was deleted), your web app in the recording will not look exactly the way the user saw it live.
To make recorded sessions time-proof and reliable no matter what happened to the original app, SessionStack now stores the current version of the static resources while the session is being recorded. If a static resource changes the new version will be updated by SessionStack immediately. This way you can replay a session exactly the way it was recorded, at any given time.
Sounds interesting? Go give the new SessionStack a try.
This post was originally shared on the SessionStack blog.