It's important to test how your project will look and feel to residents who will take part in it. You may need to test your survey and submit a few fake submissions, or submit some fake ideas and test how commenting and voting looks like. You may also be working with external organisations that would also like to test out the project before it it publicly published. Here are a few ways to make sure that your project is well tested before getting published.
Generate a preview link to send to your colleagues and stakeholders to test user experience
If a project is still in "draft" status, it is normally not visible to users without project manager rights. However, with the preview link, anyone - including external stakeholders who are not registered on the platform - can access and test the project before it is publicly published.
This is also a useful way to test the project experience yourself. The preview link reflects the project's access rights, meaning any restrictions you’ve set—such as requiring email verification—will still apply. You can use it to check how different settings affect the user experience and try out features like voting, commenting, and idea submission based on your chosen configurations.
Creating and sharing a preview link
1. In your project back-office, click on the "share" button in the top right corner next to "project settings"
2. A pop up will appear, press on "Copy link" - this will copy a private link which you can send to all stakeholders you seem fit. Anyone with the link can interact with the draft project.
Regenerating a new preview link
You can regenerate a new private link by clicking on the circle arrow. Once you regenerate a new link, the old links are not valid anymore.
This may be useful if you wish to stop those with the link to access the project. By regenerating a new link it automatically makes the previous links invalid and the project not accessible anymore with the old links.
Deleting test submissions before the project is published
After testing a project and submitting surveys/votes/comments/likes... to test user experience, you will need to make sure to delete these before publishing the project.
In the project settings, go to the "data" tab. You will be able to clear ideas, comments, votes, reactions, survey responses, poll responses, volunteers and event attendees. In the case of voting phases, this action will clear the votes but not the options.
This deletes all test submission in bulk - it is not possible to delete only a selection.