Once you have piloted the test, you will likely have found some minor things to change, and perhaps even a few major ones. The great part of this is that you get to fix your test before your real audience sees those mistakes.

Depending on your testing tool, you may be able to edit the existing test, or you may need to duplicate it and edit the new copy.

If your tool lets you edit the existing test, you can make your changes right there.

Most changes can be done without consequences, but be careful about two things:

• Editing the tree can affect your task answers.
  If you make structural changes to your tree, make sure that your task answers are still correct. For example, if you move a topic in your tree, and it was an answer to one of your tasks, you should update the task answer accordingly.
  
  
• Delete any pilot data you’ve collected.
  If you plan to use the same test instance for your real study, be sure to delete the data collected during the pilot testing. However, if the data came from representative users and you didn’t make any substantial revisions to your test after piloting, you could keep this data to join the “real” data you’ll be collecting later.
  
  
  

Some tools don’t let you edit a test that has been launched. So if you launched your test for purposing of piloting, you’ll need to duplicate it first, then edit the newly created duplicate.

This has the advantage of keeping a revision history (of sorts) in case you want to go back to a previous version to check something or to grab an older version of a task’s wording (for example).

Because you’re revising (and eventually launching) the newly created duplicate, you don’t have to worry about deleting pilot results; they’ll be attached to the previous copy, not the new one.

Next: Chapter 10 - key points