Don’t. Well if you have to there are a few things I have learned in using an Invision prototype with the Userzoom remote user research platform. One is that the custom loading page typically does not load in the Userzoom mobile app. So don’t waste time doing one of those. If you do make one, it should be as small and lightweight as possible. I tried making a nice gif animation and no matter how small I made it, it just did not load.
Another problem related to and also affects the non-loading loading page are the number of screens and the image sizes for your screens. Invision seems to load all the images upfront. So the more images and the larger the file size, the longer it takes to initially load the prototype.
In some ways this would be fine if you wanted to test how people respond to your website or app if it were slow. However, in most other cases this just puts a burden that causes some people to abandon the task resulting in an error in the tracking. You then have to manually calculate the task success if you want to not have the technical issues influence the results.
There was one other problem I had when doing mobile testing that I am not sure was a problem with Invision or Userzoom. When I tried to start tasks that linked within the prototype, Invision would end up just loading the first screen within the Userzoom app browser. I think this is due to the fact that Userzoom is also using a 3rd party tool to do the screen recording which requires the URL to be redirected. I worked around this by splitting the prototype into separate prototypes for each task.
So in summary, don’t use a custom loading page and make sure your Invision prototype itself is as small as possible. And you may need to create a separate prototype for each task you want to research. The Userzoom folks also had some additional guidelines for testing with an Invision prototype.
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Customize the Invision share link by doing the following:
- Disable Allow Commenting on Screens
- Disable Allow Access to All Screens in Prototype
- Disable Force ‘Add to Home Screen’ for mobile
- Enable Prevent Hotspot Hinting
Changing each of these customizes the initial URL which you can then plug into the Userzoom tool for the task start. For task validation, I recommend using only the part of the ending URL that is unique rather than using a full URL. Depending on the task you may want to add more than one validating URL. Make sure the validation in Userzoom is then set to “Contains” rather than “Exact”, which is the default.
In closing, we did get some good feedback and observations from the remote research, but I would not use Invision for remote user research again.
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