I guessing that you're talking about systems like Userfly that record the users interactions on a web site?
Personally I'm not convinced that they provide much value.
If you've got vaguely decent analytics you already know where the users are going on your web site and whether your goals are being met. Without being able to interact with the user is there that much extra information you can glean from watching the mouse pointer move around?
Like eye-tracking, just looking at where the mouse pointer is can be deceiving. People see the mouse as the users focus of attention – when you’ll often find folk in real test “fidgeting” with the mouse while there attention is on something else, or moving the mouse away from their current centre of attention because it was distracting. Spotting this kind of thing can be hard with this sort of recording.
It’s also harder to spot instance of the user looking like they’re trying to do X when they’re actually trying to do Y.
The key thing is the human observer. You learn so much by looking at the face of the person doing the task, asking questions afterwards (or during if it’s that sort of test.)
Userfly type applications are really, really useful at getting “what’s happening” type of information. And that’s great for identifying certain kinds of problem.
They’re really bad at getting the intent behind that behaviour.
To give one example. I was once involved in some usability tests where we observed this behaviour on the page that let folk log in (or register if they hadn’t already got an account.)
- Try to log in – and fail
- Try to log in – and fail
- ... repeat several times …
- Use the registration form
What were they trying to do?
1) Trying to log in with their username and password – and getting it wrong. Unable to figure out how to recover their username/password. Giving up and registering again.
2) Trying to register for a new account – and misunderstanding the page layout and using the login-box when they should have been using the registration box.
In this particular instance it was the latter. That would have been harder to figure out without being able to ask the participants questions because it was due to a moderately subtle layout issue.