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ErwinHaasnoot / QRTEngine

Qualtrics Reaction Time Engine (QRTEngine) is an extension to Qualtrics which allows researchers, but generally any who are interested, to easily build behavioural online experiments.
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Page transition setting causes trial flashes and blank non-QRTE display #40

Open becky-gilbert opened 8 years ago

becky-gilbert commented 8 years ago

FYI, the 'page transition' setting (under Look & Feel -> General) seems to cause problems when it is not set to 'none'. Setting the page transition to 'fade' causes 'trial flashes' during QRTE blocks and blank displays during non-QRTE blocks. The blank display makes it look like the experiment has frozen, though the experiment will respond to key presses if the page is set to continue upon a key press. I made a short demo of this behaviour called 'PageTransitionIssue' that you can find here.

I'm not suggesting that this is a bug that should be fixed. Rather, I think others may experience this problem and become confused about the cause. For instance, I found that changing the 'Theme' of one of my Qualtrics surveys caused the above problems - it turns out that the Theme I selected used a 'fade' page transition as the default. I didn't see this issue mentioned on the QRTEngine website, so perhaps it should be added somewhere.

ErwinHaasnoot commented 8 years ago

Interesting find! Seems like the fade is done by adding and removing CSS classes, and that the reported issues stem from race conditions related to the timings of the removal and addition of these classes. (QRTE checks for certain classes to exist, before they actually exist. As such, elements are not removed/displayed at the correct time

We already stress, but perhaps not enough, that plain jane should be used as the theme for QRTEngine surveys. I'll make sure to make post about this sometime. On 22 Oct 2015 17:19, "Becky Gilbert" notifications@github.com wrote:

FYI, the 'page transition' setting (under Look & Feel -> General) seems to cause problems when it is not set to 'none'. Setting the page transition to 'fade' causes 'trial flashes' during QRTE blocks and blank displays during non-QRTE blocks. The blank display makes it look like the experiment has frozen, though the experiment will respond to key presses if the page is set to continue upon a key press. I made a short demo of this behaviour called 'PageTransitionIssue' that you can find here https://drive.google.com/open?id=0Byp5NP4ysKUPSmRIY0FFcC1fdGs.

I'm not suggesting that this is a bug that should be fixed. Rather, I think others may experience this problem and become confused about the cause. For instance, I found that changing the 'Theme' of one of my Qualtrics surveys caused the above problems - it turns out that the Theme I selected used a 'fade' page transition as the default. I didn't see this issue mentioned on the QRTEngine website, so perhaps it should be added somewhere.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/ErwinHaasnoot/QRTEngine/issues/40.

becky-gilbert commented 8 years ago

Thanks for explaining the underlying cause of this behaviour. Aha, I just looked back through the QRTE tutorials and found the note about using the plain jane theme under Building an Experiment from Scratch -> Step 3. Sorry, hadn't noticed that before.

bgoodale commented 8 years ago

Just an FYI "fade" is the automatic page transition setting for the Blank (for Styling) theme. My collaborator Jessica and I were having issues getting non-QRTE questions to show, until we double checked this (following Becky's post). Low and behold, "fade" is the auto setting. Just something worth noting!