The Recordings section of Hotjar is made up of three main pages, each with its own guide article. We also have a Recordings troubleshooting FAQ page listed below.
- Recordings player: You're here. This is where the magic happens and you get to see how users interact with your site.
- Recordings configuration: This is where you start or configure Recordings capture.
- Recordings playback list: This is where you find and access Recordings of your users.
- Recordings troubleshooting FAQ: Having any trouble with Recordings? Look here!
Exploring the Recordings Player
When you open a Recording, you’ll see the Recording's playback viewer. To help explain the tools/features available in the Recordings Player, we've broken it down into five main sections below:
Keep scrolling to learn more about each section, or click on a link below to skip to the specific section you're interested in!
1. Playback viewer
When you open a recording from your Recordings dashboard, the session will start to play in the Playback viewer. The viewer allows you to see what the user experiences as they interact with your site.
Actions like loading a new page, clicks, scrolling, changing a field, changes in screen size, and cursor movements will be highlighted within the Recording. You'll also see a timeline at the bottom of the view window to help you navigate through the session.
If you notice that your recordings look distorted or missing images, it could mean that Hotjar is having a hard time locating CSS or images to display the site properly. However, when this occurs, your user will not be affected - it only impacts the recording playback within Hotjar.
Events timeline
At the bottom of the Playback window, a long horizontal bar will show the progress of the session playback, as well as some specific events that happened during the session. Below are some of the possible events that you might see in the timeline:
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- Visited New Page
- Opened New Tab (or browser window)
- Mouse Click
- Typing/Changed Field Value
- Resized Window
- Event triggered
- Recording Event applied
- Rage Click
- U-Turn
- Answered Survey
- Feedback response
Unsure of which event you're looking at in your Events timeline?
Events appear as small icons. If you're unsure what an icon is referring to, you can hover your cursor over it to see the event name or click on the info button in the Playback toolbar.
When paused on the Events timeline, two icons appear that allowing you to share a recording from the exact moment you are paused on with the arrow icon, or save a clip of the recording as a Highlight.
2. Playback toolbar
The Playback toolbar gives you control over the session recording you're watching and is made up of the components listed in left-to-right order below:
- Play/Pause - this button allows you to stop or start the playback at any time.
- Rewind/Fast forward - these buttons appear on each side of the Play/Pause button. They allow you to go backward or forward 10-seconds in the playback.
- Playback speed - to speed up the watching process, you can choose from the following speed settings: 0.5x, 1x, 2x, 4x.
- Playback time - shows the playback time in relation to the total length of the user's session.
- Skip Inactivity - skip over the parts of the session where the user was inactive. This button will only appear during an inactive part of the user's session.
- Add Comment - add comments directly to your recording timeline and collaborate with team members and stakeholders.
- Add Highlight/Reaction - allows you to create a Highlight that can be seen by, and shared with your colleagues so that you can highlight meaningful moments in the session. A Highlight can include one of the following build-in reactions: Bug, UI-UX issue, Confusion, Frustration, Success, Conversion. The saved Highlight includes a section for comments about your findings that are visible to other team members.
- Previous/Next recording - these two buttons allow you to go to the previous recording in your Recordings list, or skip to the next recording.
- Open Settings - appears as a grey cog icon. Click this to see the following setting options:
- Skip all inactivity - Automatically skip long user pauses during playback.
- Autoplay - Automatically play the next recording after one ends.
- Jump start - Begin playback at the first action that matches your filters.
- Mute clicks - Mute the sound of mouse clicks during playback.
- View all keyboard shortcuts to use during the session playback.
- Show/hide sidebar - this button allows you to hide, or reveal the right side menu that includes the Session Info tab and Actions tab.
3. URL bar
The URL bar shows the address of the page that your user was visiting when their session was being recorded. If the user visited multiple pages during their session, then you'll see the URL change as they navigate through your site. To the left and outside the URL field, you can click the Back icon to return to the Recordings page. You also have a few other icons inside the URL field:
- Go back: Click the icon with the left-pointing arrow to go back to your Recordings list page.
- Tab count: If a user visited multiple pages on your site, using a new browser tab or window, you'll the different tabs reflected here. For example, 1/4 means that the playback is currently showing the first tab/window opened during the session, but a total of 4 tabs/windows were opened before the session ended.
- Copy URL: The URL can be copied to clipboard by hovering over the URL and clicking on the copy icon, two overlapping squares.
- Open URL in new tab: This allows you to quickly visit the live page in a new tab by hovering over the URL and clicking on the new tab icon, a square with an arrow.
- View Heatmap: Visit a Heatmap of this page by clicking the flame icon.
Outside and to the right of the URL field, you also have the following options you can choose from:
- Share: This button allows you to generate a line to the recording that people outside your Hotjar account can view without having access to Hotjar. Learn more about sharing Hotjar data
- Rate (thumbs up/down icon): You’ll see a modal pop-up with the question "Is this recording worth watching?" Answer Yes or No to help us understand which Recordings are most interesting. Our goal is to develop a feature to help you target the most useful recordings, so you can spend less time watching recordings that aren't helpful.
- Delete (trash can icon): Click to delete the recording that you're currently viewing.
Why should I rate recordings?
Many of our customers don't have time to watch all their recorded sessions. Rating a recording tells Hotjar if a recording is helpful. Hotjar is developing a relevance score algorithm that sorts recordings based on key indicators of relevance from the recording data we collect. In short, the more recordings you rate, the more accurate your relevance score will be in the future!
4. Session Info tab
The Session Info tab gives you access to the following session information:
- Hotjar User ID - automatically assigned to users by Hotjar
- Country - the country associated with the user's session
- Date - the date that the user session was captured
- Device - the device type (phone, tablet, desktop) and screen resolution
- Browser - browser type (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, etc.)
- Operating system - (Mac OS, Windows, Android, Linux, etc.)
- Referrer URL - the page that the user was on before their session started (if available)
- Actions - lists the number of actions taken by the user in the session. Clicking this link will open the Actions tab which is discussed in the next section!
- User Attributes (Observe Business and Observe Scale plans only) - displays the most recent User Attributes captured for the user's session at the point the Recording ended. Attributes may be associated with the same user in the future, but that will not retroactively change the attributes shown in the recording.
5. Actions tab
All actions that occurred during a recorded session can be found in this list. You can click on a specific action in the Actions list and Hotjar will skip to that section in your Recording Player.
6. Mini-List
This section will display a list of Recordings that match your Recordings filters, so that you can see which recordings will play next, after the current session playback is completed. The Mini-List can be expanded or minimized within the playback window.