You will find that GuidedTrack is a powerful tool that can be used to run many types of studies, surveys and experiments, from fields such as: psychology, economics, social science (more broadly), marketing, and so on. These are some of many features that you may find useful:
Create self-scoring surveys that provide instant feedback to your participants.
Design dynamic studies in which the content each participant sees depends on their previous answers.
Run experiments in which different participants are delivered different content in a balanced way.
Automate multi-part studies.
Send or schedule emails from within your survey.
Integrate with external apps such as Airtable using *service.
We have created a guide to help you do high-quality research using GuidedTrack. It contains tips on how to design user-friendly studies, how to recruit, screen and reimburse study participants and how to share participant data across different platforms. You will also find code samples that you can copy and paste into your study or customize to meet your needs.
Note: The guide assumes that you have some basic GuidedTrack knowledge. If that is not the case, we suggest that you start with the GuidedTrack manual, the helpful resources listed in it, and the GuidedTrack tour:
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7:39 am on July 9, 2021 Permalink Tags: case study, payments, sample code, subscriptions
In this case study we will guide you through the process of creating a program that:
Checks if a user has an active subscription to access some content of your program.
Lets the user subscribe if they don’t have a subscription.
Allow users to manage their subscription.
If your program runs on a web browser, you will need to create a merchant account on Braintree. If it is an app, payments will be managed either by Apple or Google. In this case study, however, we will assume you are just charging users on the web, and so will use Braintree, which has a developer sandbox that is very useful to test and debug your program.
Set up a subscription on Braintree
You can create a Braintree Sandbox account for testing purposes here. When you are ready to go live, follow this link to apply for a Braintree account.
After logging into either account, navigate to Subscriptions and then click on Plans. Once there, click on New Plan.
Follow the instructions on the screen to set it up:
You will use Plan ID to identify the plan in your GuidedTrack program.
Plan Name should be descriptive and easily readable, as it is the name displayed to your subscribers when they manage their subscription.
Go to your program Settings and select the Purchases tab:
Here you can see your three options for integrating purchases (Braintree, iOS or Android). Follow the instructions on the screen to configure your provider. In the case of Braintree, all you need to do is enter the Merchant ID, Public Key and Private Key that you have located on the Braintree website.
Important: If you are using a Braintree Sandbox account to test your program, remember to come back here to update your credentials once you are ready to go live!
Write your GuidedTrack program
How you manage subscriptions inside your program is independent of the service you are using to process the payments. In other words, the code in your program is the same regardless of the provider you use (Braintree, Apple or Google) .
Check the status of a subscription
Before serving the content of your program that requires payment, you will want to check if the user has an active subscription that allows them to access it. Here is the syntax you will use:
If the user of your program does not have an active subscription and never had it before, there will be an error with the message “no purchase found”.
Otherwise, the association it will have three keys:
paid: will take “yes” and “no” for values.
ongoing: “yes” when the subscription is set to auto renew and “no” when it is not.
expiration: Date when the subscription expires. It is in text format, use the program date format parser – public to convert it into a date variable if needed.
The name of the purchase (in the example, trialPlan) must match the Plan ID that you created on Braintree.
Keep in mind that only logged-in users can subscribe. If they are not logged in, there will be an *error and the it object will be { “step” -> purchase, “details” -> { “code” -> unauthorized, “message” -> user not signed in } }. You can configure your program settings (Settings>Login) so that anonymous users are prompted to log in or register when using your program.
Tip: Follow this link to find credit card numbers you can use when testing against your Braintree Sandbox Merchant Account.
Allow users to manage their subscriptions
Use
*purchase
*management
to open a new tab or window in your user’s browser so that they can manage their subscription.
Your user’s browser may keep the program from opening a new window, you can avoid it by putting the code inside a clickable component:
*component
Click here to manage your subscription
*click
*purchase
*management
Managing your subscribers
Deleting a user’s data
If a user that has a subscription requests you to delete all their data, there are two places where to delete: GuidedTrack and Braintree.
Have them access https://www.guidedtrack.com/account, logging in with the user/password they use to access your program. From there they can delete their GuidedTrack data.
Have them provide you the email address they use to log into your program. You will use that email to find their Customer ID on the Braintree Control Panel and delete their data.
If you are processing the payments via Google or Apple, users can delete their data themselves in the appropriate app for Android or iOS.
When you are editing any program, now you will see a search bar above the code editor:
These are the things you can search for:
Keywords
Gain immediate access to all the keywords in the Toolbar. For example, if you want to use the *email keyword, type “email” in the search bar and you will notice a list of results being displayed as you type.
Clicking on the first result of the search will open the visual code editor for the *email keyword. All of GuidedTrack keywords can be accessed this way.
Programs
Browse the Program Library entering your search terms into the bar. If you are looking for a scale that measures the Big Five personality traits, type “big five” and you will get the list of programs in the library that do it:
Questions
Inject the code that generates common questions, such as a user’s age, gender, year of birth, etc. This is what you see when you search for “age”:
When you select the question you are looking for, you will see the preview of the code and have the option to insert it into your program:
Functions
GuidedTrack’s functions are also accessible via the search bar. For instance, if you want to erase an element from a collection, type “erase” in the search bar and you will find the .erase function (to delete elements that match a given value) and .remove (to delete a given index in the collection). When you click on a search result of type “function’, you can see and insert sample code on how to use it:
As you can see, the search bar allows you to quickly browse through and access all of GuidedTrack’s functionality as well as to find reusable code, functions and examples on how to use them.
