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Comment by swanson | Hacker News Reader

It's not for data, but for catching visual bugs.

The website for Glassbox (https://www.glassboxdigital.com/solution/customer-experience...) pitches the capture feature as "Watch visitors' struggles for yourself to improve your website’s customer experience."

IMO that seems inefficient. You could do the same at scale with the right implementation of events.

"Watch visitors' struggles for yourself" brought dark patterns to mind immediately.

BLACK MIRROR

It's actually a normal and proper way to improve usability if done right, i.e. in a study where you set tasks to users and watch what they're doing and where they have problems. Jakob Nielsen does this for decades.

Not sure if looking at users' screenshots is anywhere near as useful.

> You could do the same at scale with the right implementation of events.

It's not worth the cost to roll your own. I use fullstory.com for web, and it's an incredibly invaluable tool - next best thing to in-person user interviews. I'm able to see front-end errors in TrackJS/Sentry/NewRelic and find the matching session in FullStory to review with my team. With this tooling, there isn't a single issue/bug I haven't been able to re-produce and witness firsthand across any device/platform (like esoteric IE 11/Safari 10 issues).

I personally use TrackJS and find it quite useful. I never heard of Fullstory and it looks interesting. I see that they advertise showing JS errors as well similar to TrackJS. Is it not as good as TrackJS for this? I am curious why you need to use multiple if Fullstory gives that?

I'm just looking at either replacing TrackJS with Fullstory, or keeping both if fullstory is helpful with TrackJS.

I still use TrackJS for primary error reporting, but FullStory happens to capture them as well and they show them inline with the viewing session in a mock console. It's a nice little feature and can be convenient.

And in most cases incomplete. Those screenshots don't tell them what I'm trying to do (I'm looking for X, how would that show up in a screenshot/video) and they don't tell them I'm angry because of X (something is missing etc).

Sometimes it would be nice if companies just actually listened to user feedback (e.g. app store reviews, bug reports, etc) instead of only going by automatic metrics.

For catching behavioral struggles, according to this press release from Glassbox and Air Canada:

> Glassbox provides crucial insights on customer struggles and experience issues that cannot be identified by other systems and help us address them immediately” added Chartrand.[1]

[1] https://www.glassboxdigital.com/press-release/air-canada-cho...

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