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In a prototype test, the participant works through your prototype or live site while narrating their thinking, and the moderator probes on what they do — where they hesitate, what they expected, what they went looking for and couldn’t find. You get the conversation and a record of what they actually did, which is usually the more honest of the two.

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When to use it

  • Validating a flow before you build it
  • Finding where people get stuck in an existing experience
  • Comparing an old design against a new one
  • A pre-launch usability check on a live page
If you want reactions to something static — an ad, a mockup, packaging — you want a Concept Test instead. Prototype tests are for things people use.

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Adding your prototype

Attach the link in Step 2 by telling Charles about it. A Figma prototype, a clickable mockup, a staging environment, or a live production page all work. Charles builds the conversation around it — where to start participants, what to ask them to attempt, and where to probe rather than rescue.
Give participants a task, not a tour. “Find a jacket for a trip to Iceland and get it into your basket” tells you far more than “have a look around and tell me what you think.”

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How sessions are captured

There are two capture paths, and which one you get depends on your prototype.

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With the recording snippet — clicks captured directly

If you install our recording snippet on the site, every click and interaction is captured directly, with no screen share involved. Participants just use the page. This path gives you two things the screen-share path can’t:
  • A clean replay of exactly what the participant did, watchable from the Calls tab afterwards
  • A live activity digest for the moderator — during the call it can privately check what’s happening on the page and ask about it in the moment: “you’ve been on the pricing step a while — what are you weighing up?” The participant never hears this checked; it appears in your transcript afterwards as its own labelled row so you can see what the moderator was reacting to.

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With screen share — the fallback

Without the snippet, participants share their screen and the session is captured that way. You still get the recording and the conversation; you don’t get the clean interaction replay or the live activity digest. Figma prototypes always use screen share. Figma runs its own embedded runtime, so there’s no page of yours to install the snippet on. This isn’t a limitation you can configure around — if you want the richer capture, test a hosted build rather than a Figma link.

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Installing the recording snippet

You don’t have to hunt for this. When you add a link, Charles checks whether the snippet is already there — and if it isn’t, he hands you the snippet to paste into the <head> of the pages participants will visit. Once your team has deployed it, say “done” in the chat and Charles re-checks. If it’s live, the study switches to the direct-capture path automatically.
The snippet only needs to go on the pages participants will actually reach during the study, and it only records during an active interview session.

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Reviewing the results

Open the Calls tab and expand any interview. Alongside the usual transcript, responses, and summary, sessions captured with the snippet have a Replay you can open and watch — the participant’s actual path through your prototype, in order. Where the moderator checked on-site activity mid-call, you’ll see that in the transcript as its own row showing what it saw at that moment. That’s often the fastest way to find the interesting parts: jump to where the moderator started asking about hesitation.
If a session didn’t close cleanly — the participant closed the tab mid-flow, say — the replay is flagged as possibly incomplete. The conversation and transcript are unaffected.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Yes, as long as your participants can get in. Give them credentials in the study invitation, or use a staging environment with a shared account.
Yes. Add each link and Charles will structure the conversation to move between them — useful for old-versus-new comparisons.
No. The snippet goes on your site, not on their machine. Participants just click a link.
Voice is usually right — participants can share their screen, and it’s easier to narrate while clicking than to type. Video adds their face, which matters if you want to see reactions as well as actions.
Any URL your participants can reach works, including staging. It doesn’t need to be indexed, linked, or live to customers.