
Microsoft Clarity – a product to visualize user interactions - papa_bear
https://blogs.bing.com/webmaster/november-2018/Introducing-Clarity-a-web-analytics-product
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m_fayer
OSS analytics packages are unfortunately such a rarity - Piwik seems to be the
only serious game in town. All I really want is an anonymized picture of
feature uptake and some inkling as to how well we're doing in the UX and perf
departments. I want to have these things without that annoying EU cookie
widget, without shipping any data to third party services, and without loading
any third party scripts.

Unfortunately this seems to just be the frontend tracker, and the backend will
remain a closed MS service.

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cosmie
Snowplow[1] is an alternative to this. While they have a managed solution,
their backend is open source and can be self-hosted. And they have a forked
version of the Piwik client side library designed ot work with Snowplow[2].

Snowplow is a bit more generalized than just Piwik, and it shows in Piwik
having a more robust featureset for website analytics specific. But Snowplow
has a lot more usefulness if you're having to merge a bunch of data sources
together to get a picture of what's happening.

[1] [https://snowplowanalytics.com/](https://snowplowanalytics.com/)

[2] [https://github.com/snowplow/snowplow-javascript-
tracker](https://github.com/snowplow/snowplow-javascript-tracker)

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nlawalker
_When Manali started using Clarity, she realized that a lot of users were
abandoning the page before reaching the bottom, which has important
information about the recipe. After replaying sessions of users who abandoned
her blog, she noticed that users who were only interested in the recipe, which
is at the bottom, scrolled through the long post and gave up midway and
abandoned the page._

They should find a more compelling example. "Recipe at the bottom of long page
with life story and huge images" is one of the canonical examples of user-
hostile web design. EDIT: As in, no one should need a product to tell them
this is clearly not what people want.

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priyadarshy
Awesome that they are open sourcing this. I've always felt funny about paying
a ton of money to FullStory for this. I wonder what this means for FullStory
and HotJar?

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codezero
I expect they already offer more and better differentiation to not be too
terrified of this. I work for an analytics company and when our core features
are copied by larger companies it’s pretty exciting and is a driver of
innovation for ourselves.

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z3t4
It's nice to know how your users use your apps and web-sites, but I think it's
morally wrong to track user interactions in such detail. User testing is more
effective _and_ they know they are being watched. It's probably a good idea to
show a disclaimer that says everything the user does on the site will be
recorded, or better, have the user opt-in to being recorded.

~~~
codezero
I work for an analytics company - that said, their malware example is one
unlikely to come up in most user testing. I say most because I’ve seen some do
user testing over Skype with the user’s real environment.

Another piece of anecdata, I had a customer experiencing a bug I am confident
I wouldn’t have uncovered even with intense technical communication without
having session replay... our UI was breaking a POST request for a user and
there was seemingly no way for it to do so, it turns out in a number field,
Firefox had these up and down arrows to move the number up, but the attribute
that received the value when doing this was different from expected when
entering the number by keyboard.

Anyways, the scary side of session replay does arguably outweigh the upsides.
If you don’t know or care, and even if you do care it’s hard to make sure you
never capture things like credit card numbers, etc...

At my current company I’ve helped push a lot of things that make it darn near
impossible for us to capture PII, but nothing is perfect.

As someone else in this thread said, it would be nice if someone built an end
to end OSS analytics tool that was anonymizes by default, but I think even the
concept of anonymization is hard to tackle depending on how one defines
anonymous. The set of features one uses, and the frequency and/or order of use
can likely be identifying by some definition.

Opt in, for the example I described (bug hunting) would be a totally
reasonable use, but I bet you’d have a hard time justifying the cost of such a
tool if you use it for such sparse cases, and you lose out on many other
serendipitous discoveries. Again, if you think it’s morally wrong, there’s not
much to argue with in terms of using such a feature :)

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purple_ducks
Who in the world signed off on that promo video? The music was _way_ too loud
in comparison to the voice-over. Irritating.

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giancarlostoro
It's not louder, at least doesn't sound it to me, but yeah the background
music should be lowered just a bit more. I'm surprised the guy isn't yelling
as he talks, felt like I was watching something out of Rick & Morty, one of
those awkward ads.

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llarsson
Creepy. Notice how it doesn't just record where a visitor had scrolled to or
has clicked, but it apparently sends either DOM content or actual screenshots
to the server. Otherwise they would not have found out that the malware put
extra stuff in the user's Bing results.

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bergerjac
Hopefully they use it on their blog, so they can discover 22% of the screen
real estate is smothered with a sticky header.

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midoreigh
Going to [https://clarity.ms](https://clarity.ms) gives 502 Bad Gateway

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eDameXxX
You need to put "www" at the beginning. On the video they showed the full URL:
www.clarity.ms

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lyonlim
Is this free to use?

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dorukane
How does clarity differ from other tracking or session replay tools like
hotjar or fullstory? It looks like it's another Microsoft-ish-ly bad version
of other existing things.

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rchaud
It's free to use, whereas tools like FullStory cost a fortune, even when
compared to heatmap tools like HotJar.

