Introduction
A while back Mike was telling me he discovered “Clarity” existed and that I should REALLY take a look at it. I remember in initially was a it sceptic also thinking about where the potential overlap was with “Application Insights“.
As I have been working on a new project, I decided to take it for a test spin, and I must say I am impressed! Clarity is a simple and free service that allows you to see what your users are seeing. Plain “simple”… nothing more, nothing less. It will provide you insights on the usage, heatmaps of your web app and session recordings of users going through your web app. Which will help like a lot when you want to refine your user experience!
Quick skim through the service
Once signed up you are prompted to create a new project ;
After having provided that info, it will be no surprise that it shows up in the list of your projects ;
Let us open that one up, and immediately go to “Setup”. Here we can find the “Clarity tracking code” which we can embed in our webpage ;
Also be aware that you can adjust the “Masking mode” to prevent sensitive information from being sent back to Clarity ;
Once things are in place, and you allow a bit of delay to get things processed, you will see the events popping up. The Dashboard will of course give you the high level overview insights of what is happening.
If we go to heatmaps, we can see where the action is!
And with session recording we can have playbacks on the various user sessions. In the screenshot below I also highlighted (green circle) that you can see the mouse move and that it will have a kind of mouse trail (orange thingy).
Closing Thoughts
Currently I am using the combination of Clarity and Application Insights. Where the value of Clarity here is having the recorded user sessions and the heatmaps of where people go. All other metrics were already available in Application Insights… Though I hope with this post that you learned about Clarity in the same way I did and that it could help you out in your projects too!
Karim Vaes 