The Field Guide to Wild Users
Observed in their natural habitat: the Session Replay
Learning what users do once meant sitting through hours of session recordings. Until that one recording came, where a single user did something worth noting. Then, back to hours of watching and yawning. Replay Vision does that watching now, and this guide is a catalog of what it keeps finding. Our naturalist, Sir Bartholomew Hogworth, Fellow of the Royal Society, named the ten species below, drawn from thousands of observed sessions.
The species
A note from the naturalist
There is a particular kind of patience required to watch users. In my early years of fieldwork, before any of this was possible, I would sit at the edge of a single session recording and wait. Most yielded nothing. A handful would reveal something so quietly remarkable that it justified the previous forty hours of nothing in particular. By tradition, the rate of user species discovery is slow.
Until the nice people of PostHog made Replay Vision. Replay Vision watches every session on a schedule that does not require my presence. It prioritizes the problems worth surfacing, and it brings the findings to whoever is meant to receive them. The species are still out there in the field, behaving as they always have. They are simply being cataloged without me. I no longer wade through the field; I only read the field notes that come back and make decisions about the next step.
This is, in essence, the same shift that has overtaken the motorcar, now applied to software. The product self-drives, while the human reads the road ahead and decides what direction to take.
The species cataloged here are the ones we have observed often enough to name. There are more, almost certainly living in your product right now. Replay Vision is still watching. The field guide that follows is, in effect, a list of things you no longer have to look for yourself. Your job is to decide what to do about the Rage-Clicker.
– Sir Bartholomew Hogworth, F.R.S. First Edition, 2026
