

Ask YC: Review my startup, Userfly - cte

Check it out at http://userfly.com/<p>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.<p>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.<p>Would love your feedback on the idea and its direction!
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endtwist
I hate to sound like wet blanket, but from my personal experience, browsing
sessions by themselves aren't all that useful in learning about your users.
Over the past few years, I've worked a _lot_ with recording browsing sessions
(I was the creator of Tapefailure, and now VisTrac.com, which is a work-in-
progress).

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)

~~~
pjf
I think a great service would be a simple script which for each tracked URL
tells _statistically_ the average amount of time spent on each part of site
while scrolling it down, and a probability distribution of cursor position on
whole page.

For example, I wonder if PG wouldn't like to see what parts of his essays
readers need to read/rethink twice :-)

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Jasber
Very cool idea. I would definitely use something like this. I only noticed 1
small issue: it seems tabbing between input fields doesn't register. As soon
as I entered text on the first input, I tabbed to the second textarea and
entered text. The video didn't register the second textarea text until I had
clicked one of the radio buttons (using Safari 3.1.2 on Leopard 10.5.5)

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.

~~~
cte
Thanks for the feedback. Your idea about offering certain users a chance to
take place in the study is dead on to what we think is the next logical step.
Connecting an actual user with actionable contact information could help
companies close the loop with an actual user, and interact with them in the
same way they do in paid usability studies.

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jtuyen
Did you have a cold or something? I suggest you to clear out your nasal
passages before demo'ing. Unless the sniffing sound is for effect ;) Overall,
very nice work. Keep it up.

~~~
bigbang
I think the video should be shorter and 40 seconds into the video, it was the
same screenshot and it was an explanation. I would rather prefer to see some
action in the video, than pay attention to the explanation :)

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mlLK
I haven't had this much fun on a demo since some random Flash app from the
late 90s. Well executed cte, while some may discredit your app for providing
no concrete application, I for one salute you, I would have never thought to
pass a user's intuition as input. This puts the voyeurism of a Trojan virus
into a web app, which is what computer illiterates love to look at. This could
be a very bankable idea.

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FiReaNG3L
So if one of my user logins, you get their login + password? What about CC
info?

This being said, it look super useful. Can we get the option to record say, a
user out of 100?

~~~
cte
To answer your first question, we don't actively capture username/passwords.
However, in order to follow a user into an authenticated site, we have to
either setup some type of proxy (which requires some work on the client's
side), or we do some simple cookie capturing (which requires no work on the
client's side) to see what the user sees. Obviously, cookies might contain
sensitive information, which is why we're offering this as an optional premium
service only.

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.

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andr
I would have bought a subscription for this right away, as we were discussing
rolling something like that on our own for a client.

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.

~~~
cte
We're still unsure of the cost to run this service as we scale up. We are
looking for beta testers to try out our advanced features, so please email us,
and we can get you a pro account for free, and start to iterate on the product
to meet your specific needs (and lighter weight JS is definitely something we
can fix for you).

~~~
catch23
we wrote something exactly like yours for corporate customers and although I
love jQuery, we decided it was best to write it with just straight-up
javascript. It was less code than I thought it would be considering how quick
& dirty jQuery lets us do things.

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.

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gregstoll
The screencast is great - I might use this for a project I'm working on. The
demo is very useful as well to see exactly what it does and doesn't capture
(selecting text).

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 :-)

~~~
cte
That's exactly right. One user per hour means a single session. And, that
seems like a good candidate for the first FAQ :)

Thank you!

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hbien
This is amazing! Seriously, this looks like an extremely valuable web app for
people to remotely study real users.

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wensing
Great idea and solid execution, but I don't like your pricing page:

<http://userfly.com/pricing>

What is a Basic event vs. an Advanced event? How can I choose when I don't
even know what those are?

~~~
cte
Our pricing page sucks. Will fix asap. In the meantime.

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.

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plusbryan
Love the concept, could see myself using this. Might recommend a different
color scheme (I associate those with Microsoft and XP) and perhaps more polish
in general on the design side. Otherwise, very nice.

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johns
The service itself looks very well done. I'd be a little leery of using it on
an internal admin page since you're crawling the content and I wouldn't want
to leak any info to your servers.

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.

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auston
Your startup idea is awesome!

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).

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davidtimar
The demo shows the actual keys being pressed down. They also say that the
recording is stored on their server. Does this mean that if I used their
services on my site, they'd have a recording of my user logging in? If so, how
would I be comfortable with this, without knowing whether or not the recording
contained the username/password of my visitor, and who can see these
recordings?

I'd trust this service more, if it was a script, and the recordings were
stored on my server only.

David Timar

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greg
Great work on a hard problem... maybe you could adapt it to make follow-me
interactive tutorials... like a hostess who directs you to a site's most
pertinent features.

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s3graham
Neat.

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.

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dustineichler
Really great job, i mean that. What were some of the challenges you faced?
I've never captured a session before, sounds like an interesting problem
beyond cookies.

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swombat
Good site, that video is great. Got it straight away and seems a very exciting
and useful tool.

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.

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avibryant
The interactive demo is great, and this is certainly a valuable service if it
works well (is robust on real-world complex AJAX apps, doesn't slow things
down too much, can handle high volume). I've tested www.robotreplay.com which
is/was a very similar service and it fell short.

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.

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jchor
Very cool indeed! That's a good point about admin pages. Perhaps you can have
some kind of flag or config setting so that we can set which pages or
directories we don't want to be captured.

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?

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staunch
I assume it doesn't work well with Flash apps, right?

~~~
old-gregg
I guess so. One more little reason not to develop web applications using a
proprietary overgrown and buggy ad banner creation tool.

~~~
wensing
What should a person use to develop graphically-intensive web applications,
then?

~~~
old-gregg
Quake III is quite intensive and runs on all platforms. Figure out how it's
made.

Not everything needs to be cramped into a browser frame, have an annoying
login screen and eat 20% of CPU while sitting idle. Oh, did I mention the
hidden benefit of being useful offline?

~~~
wensing
I'm not really interested in deploying non-web apps at this point.

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sh1mmer
This seems like it would pair really nicely with the Feedback Army site we saw
recently. It might be interesting to incite Turkers to do virtual usability
studies with this technology. Especially if you could give them a task to
accomplish.

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huhtenberg
Thanks for the heads up. This is VERY invasive in terms of online privacy
expectations. Welcome to my AdBlock list.

Very sleek implementation though. Perhaps you should consider licensing
productized version of the same idea.

~~~
s3graham
I'm not sure if you're trolling, but I don't see how adblocking this site gets
you much. I'm sure many large sites get the same information in similar or
other ways, but just don't happen to be outsourcing the gathering of that
information.

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jdrock
Neat idea.. my only worry would be scalability on the end-user side. I.e., it
might be difficult to get an aggregate understanding of user behavior without
going through tons of videos.

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agotterer
This is really neat. Love the idea. I'm not looking for an estimate, but can
you give a general idea of pricing?

~~~
cte
Honestly, we haven't thought enough about our pricing; the cost will likely be
proportional to the # of users you need to capture in a given period of time.
For small sites I don't see us charging more than $10 a month. We are also
playing around with the idea of licensing our software, so that companies can
run the captures internally to enable ajax functionality, and keep their data
private.

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handhold
how does it differ from <http://www.clicktale.com/>?

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aneesh
Nice! I played around with the demo for a few seconds, and quickly saw your
value proposition.

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Mistone
we just launched an ecommerce shop and where looking around for just this type
of tool, going to dig in a bit more but surface review looks pretty solid. the
free account look pretty limited, and it looks like a middle option for 2-4
users would be nice.

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wastedbrains
very cool good luck with this... might have to install it and give it a shot
on the next web interface I work on.

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minalecs
this is really a great idea, and i can see how useful it is fro qa purposes

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braindead_in
nice app. love the simplistic approach.

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drwh0
but anyone in useability will tell you that you ruin the experiment if the
user knows that someone/software is looking "over their shoulder". any
software installed or testing environment introduced will produce different
results in users. this is why larger sites settle with coarser-grained
analytics derived from tracking cookies and js beacons (which can measure
abandonement). indeed cookies+beacons are a _superior_ technique because you
can randomize or exclude parts of your test body at will, or even other
metrics (geolocation etc) to add/remove people to tests at will. indeed,
everyone reading this has unwittingly been in a test for a major website at
some point without knowing it (which means your data is actually valid!)

