Testing Flows

The flow building process starts with creating the content and design, then testing what you built to ensure that it looks like you intend, and it ends with promoting the flow to show live in your product.  

Before setting a Flow to show live for your end-users, it is important to review what you built and make sure that the flow looks and behaves exactly as you expect. To help you utilize this, Userpilot provides you with two approaches:

  • Preview Mode – Review the flow content and test how It looks & behaves while in the building process within the Userpilot builder. 
  • Test Mode – Interact with your flow as an end-user while it is live in your product. 

Preview Mode

Preview is a tool that is available while building your steps in the Userpilot builder and is utilized to test how a flow would look and behave for your end-users. To enter preview mode, click the ' Preview' button in the bottom bar.

Previewing a flow can be great for many things:

  • You can quickly walk through the flow as an end-user would
  • Check that the steps of the flow appear on the right page(s)
  • Interact with form fields, redirects, buttons, etc.
  • Check step interaction behaviors such as hover or click
  • Helps in getting feedback from your teammates who have access to your Userpilot account and have the builder installed

Notes on Preview mode

  • Preview mode only requires installing the Userpilot builder and it doesn't require installing the Userpilot script on your product.
  • Preview mode doesn't check if the flow obeys the specified targeting and triggering settings - e.g. you can't test if the flow would only show up after the occurrence of a tracked event.

Content Displaying

We also provide a display of the most recent version of your created flow to be seen directly from the Userpilot web app and in multiple languages, by simply entering the flow.

Test Mode

After building your flow and previewing it to make sure it looks and behaves as expected, you might also want to test if the flow will be triggered properly in the correct situation for the correct segment. You can test it in a live environment in your product before deploying it for your end-users. 

Testing the flow live as an end-user can be great for many things: 

  • Test the flow live as an end-user outside the Userpilot builder
  • Ensure that the flow obeys the specified targeting settings - e.g. the flow shows only for new sign-ups 
  • Ensure that the flow obeys the specified triggering settings - e.g. the flow shows only once
  • Review and check how multiple live flows will interact in your product 
  • Reset the progress for the test user to review your flow endless times
  • Share the flow permalink with your colleagues and re-iterate based on their feedback

Notes on Test mode 

  • In order for you to test flows live using one of the options below, you'll need to publish the flow as well as make sure that the Userpilot code snippet is installed in your application and the test user is identified (see more about the installation here). 
  • You can always reset the history for the test user to see flows again (read more about it here). 

Options

1. Publishing the Flow in a testing or staging environment

If you're looking to publish the flow safely to your testing environment, you'll be able to control the domain it will trigger on.

To do this, head over to the domain settings, choose "Only On Specific Domains", and click on "Add Domain". Then, search for your testing or staging environment and click on "Apply". Please note that you can select the following conditions: Matches, Doesn't Match, and Wildcard.

This way when you publish the flow, it will only be available to the specified domains.

2. Publishing the Flow only to yourself and your colleagues

Setting the Audience to Only me will limit the group of eligible users to see the flow only to you and your colleagues. You can then navigate to a page where the flow would display on and test it. This is particularly useful to test multiple Flows in the same run.

Notes:

  • We recommend choosing 'Trigger Every time' under Time Based Recurrence as the frequency when choosing this option. 
  • The test user must have the Userpilot Chrome extension builder installed
3. Publishing the Flow only to internal accounts

You can limit the eligible users to see the flow based on the user properties of the internal testers. This can be done from the Audience section where you can target your desired users based on their Unique User IDs, their emails, or even their names.

This way when you publish the flow, it will only be available to the specified audience. 

4. Publishing the Flow only to people with the permalink or script

If you don't want the flow to show automatically for users, you can set the triggering settings to 'Trigger manually'. This means that the flow will only show if it is triggered programmatically using the provided script or based on a permalink. 

Note: This option can be useful when you want to share the flow with your colleagues to get feedback.

Final steps

Once you have fully tested the flow and made sure that all looks good, modify the flow targeting settings to include your desired page targeting and end-users. You can now promote the flow and publish it live to your production environment.

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