Testing a Chameleon Experience

Before activating your Experience, it's important to ensure it looks and behaves exactly as you intend. To do this, Chameleon provides you with two useful options to allow you to simulate how your Experiences will display to your users.

Note: This article presumes, you've created a Chameleon account, downloaded our Chrome Extension, and built your first Experience.

Quick access

Video Overview
Perform a fast test with 'Preview mode'
Showing an Experience just to yourself
- Clearing your user data
Sharing the Experience with your teammates
- Share with anyone at your company and beyond
Final step to activate your Experiences

Video Overview

📺 You can watch the video below for a quick overview of how you can test your Experiences with Chameleon.

Perform a fast test with 'Preview mode'

When configuring your Experience in the Builder, you can quickly jump to Preview mode to check how it behaves and displays. Hit "Preview" at the bottom of the Builder, or in the Builder' Top Bar, and this will take you out of the editing mode.

You'll see a live preview, where you can interact with the components of your Experience, just as your users would. When you want to go back to working on it, click "Edit" in the Top Bar, and the Builder will be back to assist you. 😉

In Preview mode you can navigate the Experience and your product as normal. Experiences will only show when the Display criteria are met (correct URL and any element match, or trigger that you have set).

The Top bar will let you know if the Experience is not configured to show on the current page, or if any URL or element rule is preventing it from displaying.

Preview mode is the quickest and easiest way to see how your Experience displays and behaves. All configurations (such as the buttons, dismiss, media etc.) will behave as for end users. Here are some helpful things to check for:

Does the full Experience flow look as you intended, with the right copy and design?
Is it easy and enjoyable for a user to progress through your Experience?
Are Experiences located on the correct pages and positioned as you desired?
Do Experiences appear in the correct order and can you navigate with ease?
Note: for Tours spanning across pages, users will only be redirected if you configure the Step button to launch a specific URL or click an element.

Showing an Experience just to yourself

Once you have thoroughly checked that your Experience is working correctly, then you can test it live by exiting the Builder and opening the URL where your Experience should show.

This can help you evaluate your audience targeting and the overall user experience across all Experiences you have live.

Note: To activate any Experience live, you must have the Chameleon code snippet installed on your site. You can do this directly using JavaScript, or via our integration with Twilio Segment, or Freshpaint.

👉 Explore the different options for installing Chameleon.

While you build your Experience from the Dashboard, you can set the audience to "Just me" and this will make the Experience display just to yourself. Only you will be able to see it and interact with it.

Once you're confident that everything works correctly, then you can change this to display to the right Segment, and "Apply Changes" in the final panel Review and publish.

Use this to activate an Experience directly in your Production environment, without affecting the UX of any other user, to make it easier and quicker to deploy to others after testing.

🎯 You can group domains and subdomains into Staging and Production Environments in Chameleon, and control who sees your Experiences easier.

Note: When testing your Experience live, be aware of the defined recurrence settings. In case the Experience is set to not repeat, you will only be able to see it live once. To work around this, you can clear your user history.

Clearing your user data

Depending on the configurations of your Experience, you might not be able to see it more than once.

However, you might also want to test live some cool upgrades you make to your effective onboarding process. 😎 In this case, you will need to clear your user history to be able to see this Experience with fresh eyes.

To do this, go to the Chameleon Dashboard, find your user profile, and click the refresh icon.

Once you're happy with your Experience, you can also get some second opinions from your teammates. To do this, follow these steps:

Invite them to your Chameleon account.
They will receive an email with a verification link. Once they click that and sign in to chameleon.io they will be considered another Admin user. They will then be able to see the Chameleon Builder wherever the Chameleon code snippet is installed.
Update your Experience's target audience
Change your target audience from Just Me to Chameleon Admins, and Apply the Changes to your Experience. This will mean that the live version will only go to your colleagues that are logged into chameleon.io.
Note: Only team members who are added to your account AND have logged in and viewed your Experiences in the Builder will show as Admins in segmentation. You can target other team members who are not using Chameleon actively as described below. 👇

To share an Experience more broadly with anyone at your company, you can define an audience that targets your team members based on the email domain. This will enable it for everyone that has an email address with the same domain as yours.

👉 For this to work, you must be sending the email as a user property as part of your Chameleon installation. Learn how to do that here.

Note: In the case of Tours, you can also share them via a unique URL that launches the Tour. This requires that the first Step of your Tour has a URL that can be loaded. This may be more complicated if you have dynamic components to the URL (such as user ID or account name). Learn how to handle this here.

Final steps to activate your Experiences

Once you've tested and you're happy with how the Experience triggers, looks, and behaves, then you can set the ideal target audience and Apply Changes to your live Experience.

You can use a combination of user properties, events, tour history, and other factors to target users that will find this Experience most relevant and engaging.

👉 Explore different ways for segmenting your users and targeting Experiences.