In general, our crawler works by following all links we find on a site. Completing an online form requires much more than that, as a user needs to enter information and click buttons to move through the process. Some sites may change a page's content whenever a user clicks on a button, or even a div. In these cases, a user flow allows us to test your site in ways not available to our normal crawler.
What is a user flow?
A user flow is a set of instructions to tell our crawler what to do on a given page. The first instruction in a user flow would be to tell our system to open a specific page. Each step after that is telling our system to open other web pages, click on items on a page, or input data into a form on the page. User flows are typically an additional cost for your contract, and are typically billed by the number of interactions required by the user flow.
What are “interactions”?
An interaction is any action we have to perform in the user flow. Every button we click and every form field we fill out is considered an interaction.
Can a user flow be used to log in to a password-protected site?
That would be done by a special kind of user flow we call Authentications. These are similar to user flows in that they typically contain instructions to tell our system how to fill in an online form. In addition to this, authentications are able to log back in to a site if we’re ever logged out.
That’s great! Is there anything a user flow or authentication can’t do?
There are a few things we can’t do with a user flow, or at least some things to consider when setting up a user flow.
We are not able to complete a CAPTCHA field or retrieve a code from a multi-factor authentication method.
We can’t interact with any fields that are embedded on a page inside an iframe.
Be careful around live systems. For example, you could use a user flow to complete a survey on a site. We may need to partially run this user flow many times in testing to confirm it is working, and then the flow is likely to run again on scheduled site retests. If this is a live survey the customer is using to track data, our testing of the form would have several submissions with the same data and could skew your results.
Anything we do in a user flow should be repeatable. If the user flow submits an application, can we submit that same application the next time it runs? Does the system throw an error of “you’ve already completed this application” on subsequent attempts? If we can’t complete the same flow repeatedly, you may need to set up something on your side to delete our work on a regular basis.
We use selectors to identify the buttons to click and the inputs to complete. If the selectors of these elements isn't consistent and predictable, we may have trouble completing the user flow.
Getting Started
To set up a user flow, reach out to your Customer Success Manager to verify that user flows are included in your contract.