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.
Sending a private preview link to external stakeholders and test user experience
If you are working with external stakeholders which do not have project manager rights in the platform, they will normally not be able to see a project that is still in "draft" status, however with the help of this preview link external stakeholders not registered on the platform will be able to preview the project and test it out without it being published to the public yet.
This is also a great way to test what normal users will experience when they enter the project. You will be able to see how access rights will effect the user experience as well as test out the experience of voting, adding comments and submitting ideas based on the settings you chose.
Creating 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 external stakeholders. 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.