What is recorded and how

Screen Recording and Event Tracking

Smartlook records two interconnected types of data:

• a visual presentation of the application UI as the user sees it.
• metadata about the user interaction with the application.

You can use this information for two primary purposes:

• to replay user sessions as screen recording videos showing user interactions.
• to provide data for analyses to help you understand the larger picture of the user behavior.

While it may seem that more data is always better, there are trade-offs between the amount of recorded data and the technological limits of mobile devices and user privacy.

Smartlook defaults offer a balanced setting and robust protection of user privacy that are suitable for a typical mobile application. To finely tweak the settings to be best suited for a particular application, there are several areas to look after.

Screen Recording

Screen recording quality is primarily a technologic decision, with an obvious trade-off. The crisper and smoother the video, the higher the Smartlook footprint in terms of CPU, battery, and memory usage. Also, more data is generated and transported over the network. For more information, see Screen Recording Quality.

The Rendering mode sets the level of recorded visual details. Native is the default rendering mode. Native rendering means Smartlook takes screenshots of the device screen and then composes the session recording. For more information, see Rendering modes.

Event Tracking

Smartlook tracks two interconnected types of events:

• User interaction events — finger touches, gestures, etc.
• Analytics events — button clicks, navigation between screens, and similar events that initialize an action in the application.

By default, Smartlook tracks all these events. For user privacy, events on the onscreen keyboard are not recorded. If you do not want to track all events for your users' privacy, you can set what events to track. For more information, see Handling sensitive events.

Automatically tracked events

What events are automatically recorded depends on the technology you used to create your app. In the following table, you can see what events are automatically tracked: