GuidedTrack is an ideal platform for social scientists who collect data online. The interface is simple and intuitive. It offers a flexibility and efficiency that I have not encountered in any other survey platforms. For example, creating a complicated experimental survey flow can be done with only a few lines of code. These can then be replicated and modified without the tedious pointing-and-clicking required on many other survey platforms. That said, you definitely don’t need any background in programming! The help guide has great tips and examples, and the customer support is excellent. I highly recommend GuidedTrack!
I ran all my studies for my PhD using GuidedTrack, and it really helped me to do so quickly and easily. The language is intuitive and quick to learn, with clear instructions — so it’s easy to get started and learn as you go. I found the interface much more simple and user-friendly than other tools I’ve used for designing surveys. And the user support is excellent — if I had any difficulties using the platform, I got a fast and helpful response to my questions. I’d definitely recommend GuidedTrack to other social scientists designing surveys or experiments!
Summary: A survey to collect data on people’s intrinsic values and get user feedback on the test designed to help people identify these intrinsic values.
What did you most like about GuidedTrack? I most liked how easy GuidedTrack makes it to switch between the natural language and code of a program; it felt effortless to integrate the text of the study questions with the commands for different pre-programmed question formats. I also liked how many ways it is possible to review the data collected by GuidedTrack programs: you can download it as a spreadsheet, or look at individual runs or all responses to a particular question in the data page of the program on GuidedTrack.
How many hours did it take to learn GuidedTrack? Less than 30 minutes to start writing simple code.
Summary: An online module that teaches its users how to practice nonviolent communication.
What did you most like about GuidedTrack? It doesn’t require coding experience and seems pretty easy to pick up! I have coded a lot, though, so maybe I am over estimating how straightforward this would be to someone who hasn’t coded before.
How many hours did it take to learn GuidedTrack? 2 hours.
Summary: [A] survey to find out what principles people use to guide their decisions. We used GuidedTrack to give participants different prompts to elicit their principles. We were able to export the data from GuidedTrack into a spreadsheet and easily code the responses to understand what kinds of principles people reported.
What did you most like about GuidedTrack? The simple programming language let us focus on the content of our survey — how to phrase questions, how to structure it, and to focus on analysing the results. As a programmer, I found the language very easy to pick up, but powerful and pretty fully featured. Being able to share the program code with collaborators and instantly access the survey online made developing and deploying it a smooth process.
How many hours did it take to learn GuidedTrack? Less than 10 mins before starting to build — just start writing. The language has lots of features, and I picked up things as I needed them over the course of designing the survey.
GuidedTrack nicely fills the gap between simple but relatively limited tools like Google Forms, and getting an engineer to build a custom app for you. We used GuidedTrack to make a tool that helps our users make career decisions, and a quiz that helps you decide which global problem you should work on with your career. With GuidedTrack, we were able to quickly build these relatively complex apps ourselves, without needing an engineer for any part of the process.
Others have used GuidedTrack for all kinds of projects:
We've helped others get their ideas off the ground quickly, and we'd love to help you, too.
If you've come this far and are still a bit unsure about what exactly GuidedTrack is and what it can do for you, that's understandable. After all, GuidedTrack is an extremely powerful, flexible tool that can be used in a wide variety of ways, so it's actually quite difficult for us to describe all of the functionality on one page. But here's our attempt to do it anyway!
GuidedTrack is a web service for building web apps. Those web apps come with a boatload of powerful tools: forms, email, authentication, data collection and storage, session persistence, API integrations, and so on. And while that may sound like a lot, we've tried very hard to make these tools accessible and intuitive so that anyone can use GuidedTrack, even if they have no prior experience with coding. There is some coding involved, by the way; but it's significantly simpler than picking up a programming language from scratch or building your own web app from the ground up. GuidedTrack comes with its own easy-to-learn language, which is somewhat like a very simplified version of the Python programming language.
All of the magic takes place on the GuidedTrack website. From there, you can create, edit, preview, publish, and delete your programs; add collaborators; add API integrations (like Airtable, Zapier, Google Sheets, Mailchimp, or anything else); download collected data; and view documentation about every facet of GuidedTrack. You can also reach out to the community in our Q&A site when you're stumped, and you can follow our blog to learn about new features and updates.
GuidedTrack programs are modular, composable, and extendable. That means that they can contain other GT programs, which can contain other GT programs, and so on to any depth. Programs can also be re-used in as many contexts as you can imagine. And since we can't foresee every possible use case, we've provided tools for easily augmenting your programs with custom HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to further expand your program's look, feel, and functionality.
To learn more, sign up for an account and start making programs, or check out the docs!
