While Userfly‘s promise is promising, it isn’t working very well after the first few days of use on www.tourvista.com.
My biggest objections so far when reviewing Userfly recorded sessions:
- can’t review pages past sign in: once logged in, as the user is linking to different pages and managing their account, the review is booted back to our sign in page. it’s as if the review on userfly gets logged out, maybe a cookie issue. none of my recorded reviews track a user once they are logged in. annoying! that’s one of the most important aspects that I intended to use userfly for.
- you can’t fast forward a review on a page. so, if the user spends 3 minutes reading our text or staring at a picture, I have to spend 3 minutes too. A simple fast forward 5-10 seconds would do the trick here.
- iframes are missed it seems. TourVista uses iframes when showing a virtual tour on another web page and it is not recording their interaction within iframes.
- Google map API warning pops up on any page that includes a Google map. this is annoying and you can’t review the user’s interaction with the map.
- not nearly enough captures for the pricing – i’m currently on the 10 capture free plan and we used these up right away. I didn’t learn that much from 10 captures and no way would I upgrade to get more due to the issues listed above. I recommend adding a zero to each of their current plans’ capture #.
So, for the time being, I’ve removed Userfly from all pages that require a login or cookies and am keeping it on our main public site and blog. We’ll see if it teaches me anything about our user experience on those pages.
Looks like an actual desktop recording app like Silverback will be the best way to record user sessions for now. Or just peering over people’s shoulders as they use TourVista.