Microsoft has made available a beta release of Clarity, a web analytics product which enables website developers to understand user behavior.

The company says that Clarity will help webmasters better understand why users struggle, where users run into issues or why they abandon their websites. The platform offers insights related to user behavior.

For example, the session replay capability of Clarity allows web developers to view a user's page impression to understand user interactions such as mouse movement, touch gestures, click events and much more. Being able to replay user sessions allows web developers to empathize with users and understand their pain points.

Clarity has been used by the Bing UX team at Microsoft to delve into sessions that had negative customer satisfaction and determine what went wrong. In some cases, engineers were able to detect pages that had multiple overlays of advertisements and looked nothing like the expected experience for customers. Clarity provides the layout anomalies and network request logs, helping Bing developers to diagnose the cause: malware installed on the end user's machine was hijacking the page and inserting bad content.

With the knowledge of what was causing these negative experiences, Microsoft says that Bing engineers were able to design and implement changes which defended the Bing page.

Clarity works on any HTML webpage (desktop or mobile) after adding a small piece of JavaScript to the website. This JavaScript code listens to browser events and instruments layout changes, network requests and user interactions. The instrumentation data is then uploaded and stored in the Clarity server running on Microsoft Azure.

Here are some of the new features the Clarity team is brewing up:

• Interesting sessions are automatically bubbled up based on Clarity's AI and machine learning capabilities to help web developers review user sessions with abnormal click or scroll behavior, session length, JavaScript errors and more.
• Related sessions are a grouping of similar sessions that are recommended based a single session. This feature allows web developers to understand the scope of a specific user behavior and find other occurrences for the same user as well as other users.
• Heatmaps provide a view into user behavior at an aggregate level through click/touch and scroll heatmaps. Click/touch heatmap provides distribution of user interactions across a webpage. Scroll heatmaps provide how far users scroll on your webpage.

To start using Clarity, sign up at the Clarity website using your Microsoft Account.

When you create a new project, it will be added to the waitlist. A notification will be sent when your project is approved for onboarding and you can login to Clarity to retrieve the uniquely generated JS code for your project. Once you have added the code to your website, you can use Clarity dashboard to start replaying user sessions and gain insights.

The Clarity team has also open sourced the JavaScript library which instruments pages to help understand user behavior on websites on GitHub.