Show HN: SessionForward – Simple user session replays and heatmaps

https://www.sessionforward.com/

by mahesh_rm • 6 years ago

47 54 6 years ago

mahesh_rm9• 6 years ago

Hello HN, I started working on SessionForward a few months ago, when working on a UX/UI project for a client, and could not find an tools for Sessions Replays and Heatmaps generation, which would target developers. The project is still very much in Beta, so rough around the edges. If you decide to try it out and you have any suggestions, I am happy to hear about it! I will not charge for product usage for at least a few months, till a more polished version of it will be available.

adamlangsner• 6 years ago

What is the value one would get with your product over Hotjar or fullstory? I'm curious to learn more about what attracted you to this space and where you plan on positioning yourself in the market.

mahesh_rm9• 6 years ago

Dear Adam, indeed, Hotjar and Fullstory are great tools, and as an avid user of both of them I can say they are, as of now, far more polished, solid, and complete UX suites than SessionForward really is. The straightforward answer to your question, is that as a developement oriented PM I was feeling like I wanted a frills free product focused on simplicity and performance, and that is 100% targeted towards tech, rather than marketing people. The 'vision' answer (i.e., why SF will be better than competition in the future) is based on automated neural networks driven actionable insights: sometimes you don't want/have time to go through 200 of your users not clicking on a button, you just want to receive an email telling you to please move your call to action button from the top left corner to the top right corner of your page!

stephen123• 6 years ago

Congrats it looks nice. I currently use hot jar. Looking at your site im left with one big question. How do I install it on my site?

mahesh_rm9• 6 years ago

Hello Stephen, thank you for the nice words! You are completely right, I left this basic piece of info out of landing. As for hotjar and fullstory, when you sign up you are prompted with a <script> snippet, which you can paste before the closing </head> tag of the pages you would like to track.

satvikpendem3• 6 years ago

Is this open source as well? I was thinking about self hosting it when you mentioned it last time in some other threads.

XCSme9• 6 years ago

If you are interested, I am also building a similar product, which can only be self-hosted: https://usertrack.net

From OP I see their only self-hosted version is the $499 one.

satvikpendem3• 6 years ago

Is your product open source?

mahesh_rm9• 6 years ago

Hey there! SessionForward is made up of two main pieces, a "client" library which you "require" on your page by pasting a <script> snippet, and a server, which actually collects sessions. The client side is based on MIT libraries, and I plan to open source it as soon as it will be more solid/readable. The server part of it is not opensource as of now (not sure about the future though!) And it is deployed on SessionForward servers for "non-enterprise" plans. I do want to explore the possibility offer to self host backend on-premises, even to non enterprise users, do reach out (email is on my profile) and we can talk this further!

sefrost• 6 years ago

It looks really cool and useful, but is it ethical? I find it a bit creepy that someone could watch me use a site.

nerdponx• 6 years ago

Hotjar has offered this for years. And no I do not think it is ethical, even though it can be legitimately very useful for product and UX teams.

XCSme9• 6 years ago

Why do you think it's not ethical? When you go in any shop around the world there are cameras recording you. Do consider that to be ethical because the main purpose of the cameras is security? What if they actually use the recorded video to improve shop layout, product placements and increase sales?

jedberg• 6 years ago

I'm curious as to why you think it is unethical?

How do you feel about physical stores that use video cameras? That seems like the most equivalent thing in the real world to me.

gruez2• 6 years ago

There's no expectation of privacy because you're in public. Also, the security cameras are visible and there are possibly signs informing you of this. I have yet to see a "your actions are being recorded for product improvement purposes" warning on a website. Or maybe I did, but I tuned it out because it got buried in the standard cookie warnings.

Nextgrid2• 6 years ago

It is widely understood that public places use video surveillance, and in most cases you can see the cameras themselves.

It is not widely understood that websites can essentially point a camera at your browser tab and you can’t see that camera.

ReactiveJelly3• 6 years ago

I am opposed to the Gorgon Stare project too.

Reluctantly putting up with one terrible thing does not mean I endorse even more terrible things.

the_arun• 6 years ago

It can be made ethical if we state at a visible location in the site that - "your actions are recorded for improving experience of the site" Or such message. So users know, they are being recorded. Just like we see similar messages while we are recorded in a shopping mall.

Nextgrid2• 6 years ago

“Actions” typically refer to things as clicks/page navigation or button presses. The majority of people don’t expect (and don’t even know) that sites can record mouse movements and unsubmitted keyboard input.

jeroenhd• 6 years ago

In my opinion, only if there's a popup before the recording begins and there's an option of opting out.

I don't find "You're being recorded by the way" to be a very welcoming indicator when I reach a website. If you ask, you may get consent, but if you just start recording you'll probably just end up in adblockers or people will leave your website.

As far as I know, where I'm from the warning about cameras in stores needs to be visible before you actually enter the field of vision. I'm sure stores don't care much about privacy, but the law and, in my opinion, ethics still say you should be given fair warning before you are recorded.

mahesh_rm9• 6 years ago

Thank you for the feedback. As a user of Hotjar and FullStory myself, indeed I find it creepy (albeit very helpful in order to come up with a better experience) to browse through users sessions on my/my clients website. And this is indeed one of the reasons why I started working on SessionForward: as for my answer above, eventually I want neural network models to process data from Replays and Heatmaps PMs and Devs to just receive notifications with actionable insights on how to improve their pages' user experience.

madjam002• 6 years ago

This looks like it uses rrweb which is open source and can be self hosted.

https://www.rrweb.io/ https://github.com/rrweb-io/rrweb

Nonetheless nice work and it's good to see alternatives emerge.

cpursley• 6 years ago

Neat, this should be added to: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted

mahesh_rm9• 6 years ago

Hello and sorry for delay! Yes, absolutely, under the hood it is powered by rrweb, I am working on a fork of it, which integrates with heatmap.js, and fingerprint.js, and I plan to opensource it as soon as it will be a little bit more solid!

yz-yu• 6 years ago

rrweb's author here. Very happy to see people building commercial products on top of rrweb. Also paid a lot of time in the last several months to design and implement some new features to help the rrweb scale in production, such as the storage size. Hope it will keep helping people make more interesting stuff in this area.

httgp• 6 years ago

I love the idea of an instant replay of my own session! Unfortunately, the replay doesn’t work for me on Safari on iOS.

devmunchies• 6 years ago

I get how these things record the mouse coordinates, but how do they accurately render the entire page in the replay without taking a video?

For example, I was resizing the browser and in the replay it was showing the sizes of buttons change correctly.

jessaustin• 6 years ago

It might be observing the resize event?

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/resi...

katsura• 6 years ago

They just render the whole page inside a frame. If there was a resize on the page, the frame itself is resized as well, so you should see pretty much the same thing as the visitor.

Note that this doesn't handle browser inconsistencies though. So something like that wouldn't be reflected in the "recording".

tantalor• 6 years ago

What about the user's cookie?

XCSme9• 6 years ago

In this case, if it uses rrweb, it just stores all the HTML and all DOM mutations that happen. This is a pretty accurate method (even though still doesn't record all events, for example text selection, and if you watch an mp4 video for example, it won't save the entire video, only the URL to it), but it uses a lot of data.

In my case, I created a more simple solution for userTrack.net, where I just store the URL, record all events that happen and replay them by loading the iframe at the same URL and re-triggering all the events. It's not as accurate as storing HTML and mutations, but it uses a lot less data.

mahesh_rm9• 6 years ago

Yes, this is correct. Sessionforward is based in a fork of rrweb, which integrates into multiple other MIT licensed libraries. As such, it creates a full snapshot of your page and it's mutations, and it then renders them through and iframe.

helloiloveyou• 6 years ago

I don't understand something. If you replay the events on an iframe of the real URL, each time I play the video you are hitting the site's real API? Like, if I watch the video where the user adds an item to it's cart, will the same item get added twice because I watched the video?

_up• 6 years ago

Yandex metrica offers this for free.

atian• 6 years ago

MutationObserver cannot be trusted.

andrethegiant• 6 years ago

Why is that?

cj• 6 years ago

I've spent the last 6 years building a company with a core product that relies on MutationObserver. I've personally spent many hundreds of hours working with it.

I have never encountered an issue with MutationObserver that made me doubt its accuracy.

redm• 6 years ago

Congrats on the launch.

This is finally a reasonable alternative to Fullstory and Hotjar. (we don't want to self host)

Fullstory changed pricing last year to focus on extracting large amounts of money from big customers, thus leaving small statups out effectively. So we moved to Hotjar, which requires us to constantly start a sample.

We haven't been using either. This is just what we were waiting for. Reasonable pricing for a strait forward simple service. We'll be signing up today!

XCSme9• 6 years ago

What is your main push-back against self-hosting? Setup time? Maintenence? Because self-hosting usually costs a fraction of the price of hosted services. I assume you wouldn't be interested in my Hotjar alternative (https://usertrack.net) as it's only self-hosted.

mahesh_rm9• 6 years ago

Trust me, your words sound overwhelmingly warm, and I am very happy that this effort looks compelling to you. Also, they create some pressure, since despite being functional, the tool is still at its MVP stage, and there are MANY things that I want there, which are simply not there yet. I will personally reach out to each person that signed up across the next few days, with a clear description of product functionality along with a brief roadmap, of what features you can expect in the next 1 to 6 months!

agustif• 6 years ago

I use logrocket for this.

rosstex• 6 years ago

1. This is beautifully executed.

2. It's a beautiful reminder that any number of websites may be tracking us this way.

A fun security course assignment would be to have students use this website and discuss the ethics surrounding it.

chance_state• 6 years ago

JS off by default mitigates this and a whole host of other creepy behaviors.

XCSme9• 6 years ago

Nice product! I feel that it looks a bit unpolished (but I assume it's an MVP). You might also want to check the similar product I'm working on: https://www.usertrack.net

I also started with session replays and heatmaps, but ended up adding a lot more analytics features. I personally only provide a self-hosted version as I really beleive self-hosting improves user privacy by a lot, and I don't feel comfortable storing all this possibly sensitive data (session recordings especially) on my servers.

mahesh_rm9• 6 years ago

Hey there, I checked out usertrack and it looks great! Yes indeed, I just released SessionForward publicly a few days ago and it is curently in its validation stage. Specifically, I want to test if there is a segment of tech oriented PMs, which want one tool in this space, which does one thing only and one thing very well (replays and Heatmaps), rather than dealing with a full extensive but heavy suite of UX/UI functionalities, such as Hotjar and FullStory!

gukov• 6 years ago

What a great way to demo the product, right off the bat.

Show HN: SessionForward – Simple user session replays and heatmaps

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