Overview

A "session" is a collection of events associated with a single, shared context. It could be a user, a time of day, a sales pitch, etc.. By identifying sessions you can identifying patterns across multiple sessions, patterns that can have business relevance.

Intuiface enables the identification of a session.

How to Define a Session in Intuiface

The Data Tracking interface asset includes actions enabling the identification of a session. A session has a beginning point and an endpoint.

"Start new session" action

Call this action when you want to indicate a new session has begun. At this moment, all data points generated by your experience will contain a value for the Session ID field.

Optionally, specify a Session ID. If you don't select one, a Session ID will be automatically created for you.

If your experience calls the "Start new session" action twice without calling "Stop current session" in between, the first session will be stopped automatically.

"Stop current session" action

Call this action when you want to indicate the completion of the current session. At this moment, all data points generated by your experience will have an empty value for the Session ID field.

A "Stop current session" action is also automatically logged whenever the overall experience is exited.

Building an Experience with Session Identification in Mind

With websites, it is easy to differentiate one session from another. Each session is uniquely identified by the IP address of the visitor.

With interactive content in a public environment, there is no simple way to differentiate one session from another. Since the same kiosk - for example - is used by multiple people, just using touch events to differentiate sessions won't work. Two touches in a row might be made by the same person or by two different people.

If it is important for you to differentiate sessions, construct your interactive content in a way that users are forced/encouraged to identify themselves. For example:

• Add a "Restart" button that new users can touch to start from the beginning. Whenever that button is touched, call the "Stop current session" and "Start new session" in sequence.
• Add an inactivity timer that resets your experience to an attract loop. When the timer triggers navigation to the attract loop, call the "Stop current session" action.
• Enable users to identify themselves - e.g. via RFID-enabled badge - and call the "Start new session" action whenever that happens.

No method is foolproof so be very aware of how you define a session and where the information you collect may deviate from reality.