How to protect your personal data in mobile tests

Prevent that pop-up messages on your smartphone are sharing personal information about you

PayPal or account messages, new emails, the chat message from your child.... we all get a lot of pop-up messages on our smartphones that we wouldn't necessarily share with strangers. 

However, when you participate in RapidUsertests on your mobile devices, your entire screen is recorded, including all the messages you get.

Here are a few tips on how you can avoid this:

iOS devices

Set a focus

The easiest way is to set an already existing focus that blocks incoming messages. For example, this can be "work" or "sleep".

Create your own focus

A bit more complicated, but more accurate: Configure your own RapidUsertests focus.

  1. To do this, go to Focus in the settings.
  2. Click the little plus in the upper right corner and then click "Custom".
  3. Give the focus a name, a color and an icon.
  4. Specify all other settings under "Customize focus".

You can either activate your new focus manually in the control center (open the control center by swiping down from the top right of your display) or set it to activate automatically when you open the Mirroring app.

To do so, click on "Add schedule" in the Focus options under "Automatically activate" and select the app.

Everything else about the iOS focus including screenshots can be found here.

Android devices

On Android devices, you don't currently have quite as many options as you do on iOS, but you can still make sure you don't receive any notifications during tests:

Switch to do-not-disturb mode

Swipe down from the top of the screen and tap "Do not disturb." By default, all messages will be suppressed. Read more about it here.

Enable Focus Mode

If you configured your Do Not Disturb mode to allow some calls and messages through, but want to stop this during RapidUsertests (or vice versa), you can set up a Focus Mode instead:

  1. Go to "Digital Wellbeing & Parental Controls" in Settings and tap on "Focus Mode".
  2. Here you can then select all apps that should be blocked while Focus Mode is activated.
  3. After that, you can activate Focus Mode directly.
  4. On some devices, you can also add Focus Mode to the quick settings.

You can learn more about Focus Mode on Android devices here.