Simon Willison’s Weblog

Do I need to change something on my LIVE website to do Remote usability testing? Am I needed to create a duplicate copy of my website?

29th July 2013

My answer to Do I need to change something on my LIVE website to do Remote usability testing? Am I needed to create a duplicate copy of my website? on Quora

You should be able to run a working copy (potentially with fake data or a subset of your production data) on your laptop, for development purposes. You can use the same setup for usability testing new features.

If you or your team can’t do this I’d suggest fixing that as soon as possible. Not having an effective development environment is a huge productivity disadvantage.