Preparing for the Participant Experience

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Variations in the participant experience

When you test a live site, elements like cookies, personalization, and custom experiences are part of the reality you want to understand. Different participants may see slightly different versions of the experience, and that variation is valuable since it reflects what users encounter every day.

Study creators can prepare for this in a couple of practical ways:
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1. Set light guardrails: For example, you can ask user testers to use clean browser sessions or to start from a specific entry point to reduce differences.

1. Focus on outcomes, not exact paths: Instead of checking whether someone clicks a specific button, ask whether they could complete the goal and share their thoughts. This captures the insights you really care about without forcing everyone into the same flow.

Note: Optimal's live site testing always reflects the whichever version of your site is live at the at the URL when user testers join the study.  If you're planning on pushing major updates to your website that could materially change the experience, it's best to pause the study or restart it so user testers are going through a consistent flow. This helps you gather more reliable and relevant insights.

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Testing for staging & websites behind authentication

Live site testing can work with websites requiring authentication as well as dev and test environments. To prepare, you can send specific instructions to participants before beginning a task, such as login, setup, or VPN instructions or add instructions to the welcome screen.

For example, if you require participants to create an account and you don't want to capture that through the recordings, you can ask participants in the welcome screen to create an account from outside the study so that once they start the recordings, they are already logged in.
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Designing for objectivity

As a study creator, you may want to keep your organization anonymous when testing with participants. For example, if you’re showing competitor sites, you might not want it to be obvious which organization you represent. One approach is to frame tasks around evaluating online experiences rather than naming a specific company. You can also avoid custom branding in the study, so participants focus on the tasks themselves rather than who is conducting the research.

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