User journeys can fail due to a number of reasons. Depending on your alert settings you will get a notification when the failure reaches your set parameters. If your journey is managed you have nothing to worry about as we will fully investigate when a journey fails however self-serviced journeys are managed by you.

Each journey will be unique to your business, site and purpose, covering different processes on your site. RapidSpike has many features making it extremely flexible to your needs which may mean fixing journeys can take some investigation however there are some frequent failure causes which will be worth looking into initially.

If you want to investigate a specific failure, here are some common failure messages:
– Wait for Element Failure
– Click Failure
– Form/Send Keys Failure

Step 1: Navigating to the failure

Depending on your alerting you will probably receive a notification when your journey fails. (By email, text or integration). To investigate further you will want to log into your Rapid Spike account.

The easiest way to find the failure is by looking at the User Journey Wallboards which provides a status overview for all journeys over a period of time. At the top of the dashboard is the key, we are most interested in any portion of the wallboard showing red (Most likely a recent failure). Journeys displaying orange suggest errors had occurred during the test. This doesn’t necessarily need action however it would be beneficial to know why they are being displayed by investigating further.

Pressing on that section opens a list of recent failures, press ‘View >’ to see more data for that specific journey.

Step 2: Identifying the problem

Once you are in the result dashboard you will be able to see the ‘Failure Reason’. This shows the step in which the journey failed as well as the selector, URL and any comment made in the step. Note this may not be where the journey went wrong as it the issue may have occurred earlier or for a different reason but the journey could still continue further. The bottom of this dashboard is a collection of screenshots taken during the test, there will be a failure screenshot at the end for more information.

The ‘Issues & Logs’ section goes a little further by listing everything identified as failing or with an error code.

The most important section is the ‘Script’ section which goes into detail for each individual step, if it was successful and how the journey interacted with your site. Making sure you have screenshots within each step significantly helps with the debugging process as should be able to see where the problem occurred.

Once you think you have found the reason for the failure it will be a matter of working out the problem. At the bottom of the step we provide you with a few things to help:

– End URL

– HTTP Archive

– Page Source

– HTTP Archive

– Waterfall & Elements

Step 3: Fixing the cause of the failure

Once you have identified the cause of the failure you will need to fix the problem. If you made any changes to the script make sure to ‘Save’ otherwise you will lose your progress when leaving the page. A very helpful feature is the ‘Save & Check’ with performs a check to test the changes you have rather than having to publish while debugging.

Failures are very specific to your site, journey and purpose however we have put together some common causes for journey failures. If you are unsure after investigating the failure yourself you can contact support which will go against your support allocation for the year.

Changed Selectors

When your user journey fails we will tell you which step caused the failure and information such as issues that occurred. A common reason for a journey to fail is the selector has changed on your site, this causes the step to fail in trying to find something which isn’t there. This will require looking at the elements on your site and finding a new selector to perform the action you are trying to add.

Good Selector Practises

Inputting a complicated selector increases the likelihood of a failing element to cause a failure. This may be difficult depending on the structure of your site but is a good habit to get into.

Here is an example of a complicated selector:

#productpage.header > div > div > div > .sidebar > div > button

Compared to a much simpler selector:

#checkout-bar .button

The simpler selector only needs two elements to achieve the right path however the more complicated selector relies on eight elements increasing the likelihood of a failure.