Some tips on resolving issues participants in your zTu experiment may have
W.B. Vries, de
Hi all,
I was happy to use zTu for an experiment last year. All went well, and I figured I would share some tips with you all. I hope they are of use to someone.
We ran into three problems for which we have found solutions. Presenting
these solutions to participants during the experiment (in the instructions and in
the first z-tree screen) allowed all of them to participate without any
problems:
(1) Participants’ mouse cursor may turn in to a small dot (it will still be visible). To prevent that from happening, participants should right-click on a box where they normally enter a number/text. That fixes it for the entire session. We decided to include such a box in the very first screen participants see (they did not have to enter anything there).
(2) Participants may be unable to type in a box if they use the ctrl/alt key (e.g., if they press alt-tab a lot). If that happens, they should again press ctrl or alt.
(3) Entering numbers using a numpad sometimes does not work (and a small percentage of participants will have no other way to type in numbers). A workaround is to instruct these participants to open the on-screen keyboard on their laptop/pc, so they can click the numbers.
Best,
Wout
