Key functions in LifeGuide

Key Functions in LifeGuide and what they mean for your intervention

The LifeGuide authoring tool enables you to create tailored online interventions for any number of behaviours.

In order to tailor the information we provide to end-users we first need to collect specific information from them to enable us to learn more about their personal situation. This is done through the use of interactions. Interactions can be thought of as ways of asking your end-user questions that they can respond to. Logic (or written commands) is then used based on unique names given to the interaction, to direct the end-users to the parts of the intervention most relevant to their responses.

Tailored feedback can also be provided using feedback textboxes and containers. These work with logic to make sure end-users are presented with only the information that is relevant to them. For example a page may contain dozens of feedback textboxes containing information for different situations (e.g. specific to the person’s age, gender, symptoms, level of motivation, etc) but by using logic commands relating to the interactions and feedback boxes only the relevant information is presented. It will become clear throughout this manual that everything you create in the LifeGuide authoring tool requires a unique name. So, each page will need a unique name, each interaction on that page will need to have a unique name and every response name in the interaction will need to be unique.

Logic can be considered the glue of the intervention; it is what makes the intervention work. Logic helps to navigate end-users to the next page of the intervention by specifying the order in which pages are viewed. The order in which you create your intervention pages does not matter (you could create the final page first) as it is the logic that determines the order in which pages occur. Researchers can also use logic commands to work behind the scenes of an intervention to automatically randomise end-users into groups, send automatic e-mails, create user accounts and lots more. Detailed tutorials including how to write the logic for these functions can be found in these help-files.

One final thing to remember is that each intervention page (apart from the final page) requires a button to allow end-users to move from that page to the next one that is specified in the logic.