Overview
Before activating your Guide, it's important to ensure it looks and behaves exactly as you intend. To do this, UserGuiding provides you with two options:
Preview: for experiencing how your Guide looks and behaves (as a UserGuiding admin)
Only Me: for experiencing how all Guides interact in your product (as an end-user)
Preview with Chrome Extension
You can click the Play Button to preview your work so far when creating Guides and Hotspots.
You can preview a single-step Hotspot/Guide from the start or a group of Hotspots on a single page.
Click on Preview to take you out of editing mode (by closing the step editor in the extension), and you'll see a live preview where you can interact with the components of your content.
You can navigate the Guide and your product as normal. However, Guides will only show when the "Triggering" criteria are met (correct URL and any element match/click you have set).
Why is it important to use Preview?
Preview is the easiest way to see how your Guide behaves. All configurations (such as the button, dismiss, media, etc.) will behave the same for end-users.
Here are some helpful things to check for:
Does the flow of your Guide look as you intended, with the correct components and design?
Are Guides located on the correct pages and positioned as you desire?
Do Guide Steps appear in the correct order, and can you navigate easily?
Important: For Guides spanning across pages, users will only be redirected if you configure the Step Button to launch a specific URL or click a UI element.)
Is it easy and enjoyable for a user to progress through your Guide?
You can test it live once you check that your Guide is working correctly. This can help you evaluate your audience targeting and overall user experience across all of the Guides you have live.
To activate any Guides live, you must install the UserGuiding's JS code snippet on your platform. Learn more about your installation options here.
How to preview Checklists
Checklists have their in-house preview option. You can preview your checklist on the fly and keep track of the changes you make.
How to preview a Survey
Surveys have an in-house preview option in Settings.
Showing a UserGuiding content to just yourself
Once UserGuiding is installed on your platform, you can also test the published live version of your content from the end-user perspective.
Go to the settings page of the content you want to make visible only for yourself.
Set Audience Segmentation to Only Me.
Save your work and Publish Changes.
Important: To use the "Only Me" option, ensure you're not accessing your website through incognito mode.
If you select your target Audience segment as "Only Me," your content will only show live to you.
You can use this to activate a Guide directly on your Production environment, without affecting the UX of any other user, to make it easier and quicker to deploy to others after testing.
Once you're confident, you can adjust this to display it to others. For example, you can make your Guide visible for All Users or a particular group of users, also called a Custom Segment.
For the latter, first, you need to create custom segments for your end users. Learn more here.