New Activity Guidance Options

We recently released a new Study Setting that provides administrators with better control over the automated guidance that helps participants find and return to activities in a study. This guidance system can now be simplified or completely disabled.

We recently released a new Study Setting that provides administrators with better control over the automated guidance that helps participants find and return to activities in a study. This guidance system can now be simplified or completely disabled.

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Activity Guidance Overview

Recollective studies are made up of activities and each activity may contain one or more tasks (e.g. video submission, image review, text response, etc.). The tasks in an activity are always in sequence like a set of survey questions. Activities are also given an order for completion as they typically belong to a logical overall sequence. The order of activities is often used in combination with a schedule that progressively reveals the activities over the duration of a study. From a participant’s perspective, activity guidance appears in two locations. The first is in the Study Overview message that welcomes all returning participants (seen only if a message has been configured). The main button of that message window guides participants to their first or next activity as shown below. Note that a partially completed activity will be suggested first as we definitely don’t want half-completed responses in the study.

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The second, and more prominent location for activity guidance is below the main navigation tabs as seen below. It appears after an activity has been completed when there are more activities still to complete.

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When all activities have been completed, participants are guided to browse the summary of responses or join any ongoing discussions (if discussions are in use).

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Simplifying Guidance

The sequence of activities can be a suggestion or it can be strictly enforced, but there are times when there is no sequence at all. In these studies, each activity is effectively optional and participants are being asked to select the ones they’d like complete. Perhaps you have an activity for each product category and participants are only expected to give feedback for the products they’ve used. In this case, guiding people through a preset sequence of activities is actually counterintuitive.

Guidance-Simplified

To help address this use case, Recollective study administrators can now select a simplified guidance option labeled “Return to list of activities” instead of “Suggest next activity”. In this mode, Recollective simply lets participants know there is more to do and links them back to My Activities. In some cases, activity guidance is not needed at all and this new Study Setting also allows you to select “Disable guidance”.

Configuring Activity Guidance

To configure the degree of desired activity guidance, simply visit Study Settings and then select Basic Configuration. A new section labeled Activity Guidance now appears as shown below.

ActivityGuidance2

To preview this change as a participant, select “View Study As…” in the Control Panel (below your profile photo on the right-hand side). This allows you to view the study from a participant’s perspective. You can also select a participant from the directory and use “Support Login” to view the study from that specific person’s perspective. Be sure to also read about the other major new feature of this release, True Multilingual Support.

Philippe Dame
Co-Founder & CPO

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