There's many services that provide this these days, including HotJar (paid) and Microsoft Clarity (free).
Being able to see users actually use your site, combined with heatmaps and more really lets your team focus on usability issues, or help direct attention to more important features.
Things like, do users struggle to find the shopping cart button? Are they confused about how to create an account? Is it frustrating to make changes to something, etc. Engineers are really bad at understanding usability issues unless they see it for themselves.
However, it does tend to be something you review/monitor sporadically, not every day. You have to have enough samples to see if changes have had a significant impact or not.
The ones we've used have all had the ability to censor what the tool believes to be sensitive information, such as passwords, credit card numbers, etc. In our experience, these tools overzealously censor on-page text out of an abundance of caution - which is just fine. Rarely are you interested in reading the text on screen, rather, you're watching how the user interacts with the page.
It's kind of a ridiculous notion that a site operator cannot monitor how users use the site... this is not wiretapping and I assume (hope) it gets thrown out.
Being able to see users actually use your site, combined with heatmaps and more really lets your team focus on usability issues, or help direct attention to more important features.
Things like, do users struggle to find the shopping cart button? Are they confused about how to create an account? Is it frustrating to make changes to something, etc. Engineers are really bad at understanding usability issues unless they see it for themselves.
However, it does tend to be something you review/monitor sporadically, not every day. You have to have enough samples to see if changes have had a significant impact or not.
The ones we've used have all had the ability to censor what the tool believes to be sensitive information, such as passwords, credit card numbers, etc. In our experience, these tools overzealously censor on-page text out of an abundance of caution - which is just fine. Rarely are you interested in reading the text on screen, rather, you're watching how the user interacts with the page.
It's kind of a ridiculous notion that a site operator cannot monitor how users use the site... this is not wiretapping and I assume (hope) it gets thrown out.