Merge traces

After you or your colleagues have captured more traces and you have reviewed the results, it's time to bring all the relevant pieces together to build a comprehensive picture of the task!

You can review the collected results and merge them to find the similarities and differences.

Select the Merge traces button to select the traces you want to merge and go with either the Auto merge (1) Guided merge (2) or Compare (3) approach.

Note: Editing the captured trace steps affects the auto merge capability. Adding a step or decision with branches manually to the automatically captured trace, makes the trace unavailable for the auto merge.

Auto merge

Task Mining will analyze the steps and actions and define what to merge and where to add decision points. You can edit the merged results if you need to align them with your expectations.

You can merge up to 10 traces automatically at once. Each trace should contain at least 1 step.

After you capture the screenshots of the task, we logically group them into specific groups (clusters) to build the task map based on them.

A trace with manually added steps, won't be available for the auto-merge.

When you use the Auto merge option, the selected traces get merged into a new trace that appears after the merging is finished. In this new trace, all images are shown in one single step that indicates the source trace of the image.

Now you can review the generated task map and edit it if needed. Feel free to rename the steps and decisions titles, add more details to the captured actions, or remove unnecessary ones.

Just select the step to view the list of actions, or turn on the image preview on the bottom right side toolbar to easily navigate the task map.

To save changes, use the Save button on the header panel.

Guided merge

Task Mining lets you walk through each step of the first trace one by one and decide how to combine it with the steps of another trace.

You can merge only two traces at once with a guided approach.

With this option, you get to the page of merging experience.

Here, you have to go through each step of one of the traces one by one and decide on how it matches with the steps of another trace - you insert the step as a new one, merge it with another step, add a decision point, etc.

List of available operations:

append element - adds element after the selected element on the combined trace.
append all elements - adds element and all of its descendants (branches, steps, etc.) after the selected element on the combined trace.
merge actions - merges the actions of the step with the actions of a selected element on the combined trace (adds them after the last action of the selected step).
skip - use this to mark the elements that you've reviewed for easier navigation through the diagram and merging elements.

For a better view, you can go to a full-screen mode of the guided merge page (icon on the top-right corner).

The left side diagram (Incoming trace) is in read-only mode and the right side diagram (Combined trace) is editable so you can delete actions, add new elements, etc.

If you merge the wrong step, you can use the undo/redo button placed on the header bar.

When all elements are merged, a notification message is displayed. Select the Save as option to save the merged trace as a new trace with the merged steps.