Test and pilot (soft launch) your Study

✅ Plan Availability: All Plans
👥 User roles: Owner, Admins, Researchers, and Collaborators
For more information, see our article on how to find your plan and user role.

This article applies to: UserZoom

On this page:

• About testing
• Test your Study
• About piloting (soft launching) a Study
• Pilot (soft launch) a Study

About testing

• Test Study functionality allows you to test each segment of your study internally before collecting data from real participants.
• This ensures that the study setup, logic, conditions, and wording are correct.
• Use Test Links to get colleagues to test your study, even those without access to UserZoom Manager.
• To analyze the results collected from testers, filter the data based on testers.
• After testing your study internally, pilot (soft launch) to a small group of participants. Learn more below. 

Mobile App Studies

Only segments with Invitation links as the start method can be tested.

Moderated Studies

• The Test Study feature is not available.
• If you would like to test the whole participant experience:
  1. Conduct a real Moderated session as a test.
  2. Clear the data if no real data was collected or exclude the participants from your results.

Test your Study

1. Go to the Monitor section of your study.
2. Click Test study at the top right.
3. If your study has more than one segment, choose a segment from the drop-down.
4. Access your study.
   • Desktop Studies:
     • Click Copy link to copy the test URL to send to colleagues.
       OR
     • Click Test to test the study yourself.
       
   • Mobile and Tablet Studies:
     • Scan the QR code to access the study directly and test yourself.
       OR
     • Download the QR code:
       1. Right-click on the QR code.
       2. Choose Save image as.
       3. Share it with other testers.
          

About piloting (soft launching) a Study

• Running a pilot, or soft launch, of your study allows you to make sure your study is getting the insights that you need.
• Your pilot study should consist of roughly 10% of the participants needed for your total study quota. Or, simply one (1) test participant.
• Launching to this smaller sample size allows you to see how people who aren't as close to what's being tested as you understand the tasks and questions.

Pilot (soft launch) a Study

1. Make sure you've tested your study first. 
2. Set up your segments normally, but only set your quota for the pilot to 10% of the total quota.
3. Launch the study.
4. Review your results.
   Pro tip: Remember to update your results filter(s) to Completes Only to make sure you're looking at the pilot responses.
5. Make changes based on findings.
6. Next steps:
   • Minor issues
     1. If your study is still live, stop the study.
     2. Edit your study.
     3. Add a new segment with the full quota.
     4. Set the segment to active.
     5. Save the segment.
     6. Launch to your full quota.
   • Major issues
     1. Duplicate your study.
     2. Start this process over from the beginning (Build, test, soft launch, review, etc).

Pro tip

This takes time but this is time well spent. Putting out a study that doesn't answer your research questions wastes precious time, money, and participants. Getting the questions and tasks right will give you actionable feedback to work with. Multiple pilots (soft launches) may be needed to fine-tune your study to yield this actionable feedback. Rome wasn't built in a day, and often times neither are great studies! 

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