Microsoft has announced a new tool for web developers, Clarity, which is meant to help them understand the finer details of how customers interact with their website.
The key feature that enables these insights into the user experience is called Session Replay, which records and saves user interactions with the website so that developers can see exactly how people navigate the page, which is basically a more intelligent "heatmap" that webmasters might use for the same purpose. Clarity can record mouse movements, touch gestures, clicks, and more to give webmasters a clear idea of what problems they might experience while browsing.
Microsoft uses Bing as an example of how Clarity can help developers improve the website experience, even in very particular scenarios. The tool allowed them to discover that some users were seeing a large number of ads that Microsoft hadn"t built into Bing. This led to the discovery that the end user had some malware on their computer, which was hijacking Bing"s website and injecting ads into it. Once the issue was discovered, the team could implement defenses to prevent malware from attacking the web page.
Clarity will also soon get additional capabilities thanks to artificial intelligence, such as the ability to surface more interesting sessions with unusual interactions, so developers can quickly address more specific problems. Sessions with similar behaviors will also be grouped, which should provide a clearer idea of the most common problems with the page. This will also be aided by aggregate heatmaps for clicking, touching, and scrolling.
Clarity is based on JavaScript and should work on any website on both desktop and mobile devices. If this interests you, you can visit the Clarity homepage to get started. You can also contribute to Clarity.js on GitHub.