Part of setting up a test is decided when to shut it down – that is, when do you consider your test done?
The 2 biggest drivers are usually numbers and time:
- You may decide that you need 100 participants, so you run the test until you get that number. Note that this might take 3 days or 3 weeks. Some tools let you automatically close the study when you hit a specified total.
- You may only have a limited time to get your results – say, a week. Some tools let you set a date when the study will automatically close, and you have to be satisfied by whatever numbers you get.
In our studies, we prefer to close the test manually. While we always have a good idea of the numbers we want, and the time we can spend on this round of testing, we also like to have some wiggle room. Perhaps we got more responses than we expected, so we can close the test early and get started on the analysis. Or (more often) we get fewer responses than we hoped, so we might want to run the study for an extra week. Manual control lets us decide based on how the test is going.
Once the test is closed, there are a few more things to do – see Chapter ~, Running The Test.
Next: Setting up the tree and tasks