In short, Userfly captures actual browsing sessions from real users as if you were looking over their shoulder. What we've found is that watching real users actually use your site can be remarkably insightful, so we built Userfly to accomplish that goal.
There's a screencast that will walk you through the basic functionality. Click on the demo button above it to mess around without having to sign up for an account.
Would love your feedback on the idea and its direction!
The main issue is that the sessions aren't focused (you don't know about the goal of the user) and watching tens/hundreds/thousands of recordings to get an idea of what users are or aren't doing on your website is simply impractical.
What, I believe, is really important is summarized data; taking the data and boiling it down to more specific bits of information about how the users are browsing: What are they doing on the page? How long does it take them? Collectively, what is and isn't being focused on? What about how users interact with forms?
These are just some very broad examples, but there are many ways in which you can distill the recorded data, and I find those to be far more insightful than the browsing sessions themselves (look at some of what ClickTale is doing).
There is a lot that can be done in this field (otherwise I wouldn't be working in it myself), but I think recording user sessions is only the very least of it.
Despite my reservations, I'd love to have a chance to further discuss your plans. What would be the easiest way for me to get directly in touch with you? (My email is available via the "Questions? Comments? Contact." link on VisTrac.com)
For example, I wonder if PG wouldn't like to see what parts of his essays readers need to read/rethink twice :-)
However, your pricing page being a "mailto" link put me off. Tell the price right away.
Also, what are "advanced" events?
63KB is a little too heavy I'd say. Perhaps rewrite this so it doesn't use jQuery, or at least give me the option to skip it in the tracker js if I'm already using it on my site.
Also, if you need to do something like the jQuery css selector style stuff, you might want to look at sizzle by jeresig. It clocks in at 4kb which isn't too big of an overhead.
Perhaps you could also work in goals somehow. This is one of the best things about usability tests--giving users a set of goals to complete and watching how they respond. Maybe offering certain users a chance to take place in the study with X reward?
Also, CrazyEgg (another site for visualizing clicks but implemented as a heatmap) lets you run campaigns, which is extremely useful. Considering you generally want to run tests like this after you've made changes, having a set limit is a good idea (10 hours, 100 users, etc...).
One small critique, I got bored with the video and went straight for the demo. I'd suggest making the video shorter or somehow showing "the goods" up-front.
Very nice idea and good implementation.
This being said, it look super useful. Can we get the option to record say, a user out of 100?
As for your second question, we can certainly setup the service such that it captures a certain percentage of users, and it's certainly a route we would consider depending on the size of the client.
In the pricing table, does "users per hour" mean the number of sessions that are captured? That's what I took it to mean but I'm not sure.
You should probably put some answers to your FAQs :-)
Thank you!
What is a Basic event vs. an Advanced event? How can I choose when I don't even know what those are?
Simple events = mouse movements, clicks, focus events, scrolling etc.
Advanced events = DOM mutation events triggered by ajax and other types of sophisticated javascript: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOM_Events
We will likely have to do customer specific fixes to get advanced event captures working well during our beta phase, which is why we want you to email us if you are at all interested.
Very sleek implementation though. Perhaps you should consider licensing productized version of the same idea.
The marketing portion of the web site looks like a work in progress. There's too many nav points (every corner). I would simplify that. The video could use some polish but it gets the point across. I would shorten the part where you're recording a session to get to the playback quicker since that's the selling point.
Overall though, very impressive work.
A few things:
1. If you want to get more signups, make your homepage LOOK better.
2. If you could get the referral source of the user (and make it optional, cause I might want to use it on my webapp), you could get more of an idea of what that person wanted from your site (like if they got there by searching "how to write user interaction javascript", you would know their goal)
3. You need to charge for this!
4. I'll get more once I sign up and implement it on my site(s).
I'd trust this service more, if it was a script, and the recordings were stored on my server only.
David Timar
Might be neat to try "merging" movies for a particular page. Perhaps it's not too easy because you're modifying one copy of the DOM though. It seems like it'd be useful to watch a whole bunch of users' interactions with a particular page at the same time, and then drill down to more closely examine a few who got confused, etc. I feel like it might get a bit tedious to watch a hundreds of versions of almost the same thing otherwise.
Wonder if it works with Flex/Flash apps... I imagine not...
Pricing-wise, I think you should make the free version more than 1 user session and per-day rather than per-hour... 10 user sessions per day sounds and feels better than 1 user session per hour, somehow.
20 user sessions per day would sound pretty good.
I think you should be more open about your pricing - asking us to email you for an estimate is going to turn a lot of people off.
I have a question about SSL sessions. The video mentioned that replays are done through you since the web page is crawled, so are you spoofing and logging in as the user in order to do the logged in pages?
