Sharing the intervention with participants
Getting Started Instructions
When you share your intervention with participants, ensure that you provide clear, step-by-step instructions for how to access and sign-up to your intervention. We recommend that you use the Person-based Approach to develop your sign-up instructions with your user group, as the web experience of different user groups will vary.
For example:
To take part in the xxx study:
- Open your web browser on your computer
- Type the following into the address bar at the top of the screen:
- tinyurl.com/xxx
- The first time you go to the website you will need to sign-up rather than login.
- You will be asked to enter your email address and create a username and password. You will use your username and password whenever you login to use the website.
Intervention Web Address
There are two web addresses that you can access your live intervention with:
- https://shortname.lifeguidewebsites.org (web address for participants)
- https://lifeguide.ecs.soton.ac.uk/player/play/shortname (web address for researchers)
To share the intervention with participants, we recommend that you create a shortened web address, using a redirection service such as tinyurl.com.
Alternatively, you could buy your own domain from a service such as godaddy to set up a 301 redirect. This is very easy to do on most domain-name selling websites.
Choose a short, memorable and relevant name, and link it to https://shortname.lifeguidewebsites.org (replacing shortname with the shortname of your live intervention).
We do not recommend sharing either web addresses 1. or 2. with participants.
This has resulted in participants google searching for the intervention and mistakenly signing up for the LifeGuide Community website rather than the correct intervention.