The most difficult thing facing developers when they have bugs or crashes is that they can’t always reproduce the issue on their end. Their end users are not always expressive enough to explain how they encountered a bug, and this is where Instabug's User Steps feature can help. This allows developers to reproduce bugs and then fix them faster.
Let's explore more details about what we capture, how the user steps appear on the dashboard, and how to use Repro Steps.
What do User Steps capture?
Instabug tracks UI Interactions, starting with the application's launch and continuing as it runs, both in the background and in the foreground. You'll receive a list of UI elements that the user pressed or swiped before the bug occurred.
This will tell you exactly how to reproduce the bug or crash that has been reported. User steps also capture most forms of events, including tap, force touch, long press, scroll, swipe, pinch, motion, application, or view.
The way user steps are reported makes them easy to read; they're formatted in a very simple way. It varies from one platform to another, which is explained in more detail for iOS and Android.
Next, let's see how to view the user steps in Bug Reporting and Crash Reporting.
Where can I find User Steps in my bug reports?
Navigate from your dashboard to the bug reports page (use the left navigation bar).
Open any bug from the bugs list to view its details.
Scroll down until you find the logging section where you can filter by user steps.
Where can I find User Steps in my crash reports?
Navigate from the dashboard to the crash reports page (using the left navigation bar).
Open any crash from the crashes list to view its details.
From the crash details page, click the "Occurrences" button.
Scroll down until you find the logs section, where you can filter by user steps.
Filtering the User Steps
You can also filter the user steps based on events. Just select from among the filtering options in the logs section.
What are Visual Repro Steps?
For Bug Reporting and Crash Reporting, you can check the visual representation of the user steps by clicking on the "Repro Steps" button. This will display the set of steps the user took while in a specific view. All the interactions that took place in this view are grouped together until the user navigates away from the view.
Private Views:
From your end, you can easily mark any view that might contain sensitive info, like payment details, as a private view.
Any private view will automatically appear with a black overlay covering it in any screenshot.
Auto Masking:
This feature automatically masks sensitive data when screenshots are captured while protecting the user's privacy. This affects both Bug and Crash Reporting.
You can mask text fields, labels, media, or a mix of them.
ℹ️ For Crash Reporting, visual Repro Steps are disabled by default.
If you'd like to enable them, feel free to contact our support team using the chat bubble at the bottom right corner of your dashboard.
It's worth mentioning here that all of this is done without adding a single line of code!
For more details and instructions on how to enable or disable user steps, please look at our documentation (iOS, Android, React Native).
Related Articles
Now that you've reviewed the User Steps and Visual Repro Steps, you might want to review the other log types we send with each report: network logs, Instabug logs, console logs, and user events.