Dead Click
- Dead Click
- A click on an element where nothing visibly changes — no DOM mutation, no network request, no navigation — within a short window after the click.
Detailed Explanation
Dead clicks are the silent cousin of rage clicks. The user clicks once, expects something to happen, and gets nothing. They may shrug and leave; they may rage-click a few seconds later. Mechanically, a dead click is detected by joining a click event to a brief "did anything happen?" window — typically 500–1000ms — and checking for any DOM mutation, fetch, navigation, or focus shift on the page. The trickiest part is excluding intentional no-ops: clicking an already-focused input, clicking a disabled button (which is correct UX), or clicking outside a modal to close it. A well-tuned detector ignores the disabled case (because the disabled state is itself a response) and reports the rest.
How Relyv helps: Relyv joins each click to the next 800ms of activity on the page. If nothing observable happens, the click is tagged dead and its target selector is rolled up into the frustration heatmap. Recurring dead-click targets across many sessions become a ranked list of suspected broken interactions — usually a missing event listener, a regressed CSS rule that swallowed the click, or a client-side route that silently failed.