Your first run

This walks from signing in to a finished report. Once you are signed in, the app moves through three steps, shown at the top of each page: 01 Product, 02 Plan and 03 Run.

1. Sign in

Open app.usetrawler.com and choose Continue with GitHub or Continue with Google. There are no passwords.

Unless your email address has a pending invitation to a workspace, your first sign-in creates one for you, named after your email address — ana-silva-org for ana.silva@…. Its name is shown in the top-right corner of each page. See Sign-in and your workspace.

2. Paste the product’s address

The first page asks What should Trawler use?

• Product URL — the address of the page a new user would open first. https:// is added if you leave it out.
• Anything specific to test? — optional. A few words such as the new team-invite flow steer the people and goals Trawler proposes.

Choose Analyze product. Trawler reads that page and builds a plan; this takes about half a minute. If the address cannot be read you get a message saying why — see From a URL to a plan.

3. Review the plan

The plan page lists These people will try it and What they want to get done. Every person pursues every goal, in order.

Change anything that does not fit your product: rename a person, rewrite what they are like, add or remove a goal. A bar appears once you change something; choose Save plan. See Editing the plan.

If your product needs an account, choose Your product needs sign-in? Add a test account, add one, and pick it under Signs in as for each person who should use it. See Test accounts.

4. Start

The Start panel at the bottom of the plan page asks for what the run needs:

1. An API key from your model provider — only the first time, and only an owner or admin of the workspace can add it. Runs are billed to that key directly. See Your model key.
2. A model. One is picked for you from the models your key can use.
3. The hard cap. The estimate above it says what the run is likely to cost; the cap, $2 by default, is where it stops spending.
4. The checkbox confirming that you are authorised to test this product and that it is not a production system with real people’s data.

Choose Start run. Trawler checks the key with a small real call to the model, then opens the run page. See Starting a run.

Note

Hosted runs are in a private beta. If your email address is not on the list, the model field and Start run say Hosted runs are in private beta. Write to contact@usetrawler.com to get access.

5. Follow the run

The run page shows the cost against the cap, how many goals were reached, and a card per person saying what they are doing. People take their turn one after another; you can close the tab and come back — the run keeps going. See Following a run.

6. Read the report

When the people have finished, every defect is replayed by a fresh agent and judged. The report at the bottom of the same page starts with Confirmed — defects a fresh agent reproduced and the judge agreed with. See Reading the report.

The app has no list of past runs yet, so keep the run page’s address if you want to come back to it.