Most “set a goal and you’ll achieve it” advice is folk wisdom. Gintarė wanted to test it properly, and her bachelor’s thesis asked one question: does setting a goal, with someone in your corner, change the outcome over a month?
That needed more than a Google Form. Every participant is randomly assigned to one of three groups: control, momentary (message a support person in the moment of resistance), or weekly (a scheduled check-in). The questions, the step count and the closing summary all branch on that assignment.
The welcome screen
The mascot waves from the top, the progress bar is pinned above the fold, and the primary action sits in thumb reach. 92% of participants filled the form in on a phone.
The consent screen
The ethics board requires informed consent before question one. The hard part is getting someone to read a wall of text on a phone, so the “Tęsti” button loads disabled and out of reach, the text cuts off mid-sentence at the fold, and only a scroll to the bottom plus a tick on the checkbox turn the button on.
What that guarantees is that the text was scrolled, not that it was read. That is the ceiling for any consent screen on a phone.
Try it yourself
Button states
Capturing the email, twice
The email holds the study together, and getting it wrong drops the participant out of the dataset a month later without anyone noticing. So it gets asked on the second screen, validated server-side, and saved as a partial submission before anything else.
Regex catches a malformed address. It does not catch gnail.com. So the next screen shows the address back with the mascot looking worried and asks “Is it correct?” One extra tap buys a participant who is still reachable in week four.
The mascot starts paying attention
The first real question is biological sex, and it is where the mascot stops being decoration. Tap “Moteris” and the panda gains a sweater, a scarf and a knit hat. Tap “Vyras” and it changes again. “Kita” leaves it neutral, because a third costume would say more than we know about the person answering.
Kokia Jūsų biologinė lytis?
A mascot for a question
Glasses and a book for education, a clipboard with a target on it for goal-setting. The survey runs in phases, and without a cue those transitions blur and the form just feels long.
Sliders are awkward on mobile. So the age lives in a tooltip above the handle, and two arrows nudge it a year at a time. The mascot riding the handle is the charm. The tooltip and the arrows are the usability work.
Setting a goal, one constraint at a time
Most forms treat “what’s your goal?” as a single text input.
Four rounds of refinement is not a neutral way to collect a sentence. It is an intervention, and every group gets it. What the control group controls for is the support person, not goal-setting.
Likert scales, but readable
Thirty-odd Likert questions carry the study, and they are where people glaze over and start clicking at random.
Dažnai gailiuosi, kad nesiėmiau užduočių anksčiau.
Nurodykite, kiek teiginys apibūdina Jus.
Teaching the protocol inside the form
The last screens teach the assignment while the participant is still in the form. The momentary group has to recruit a support person and message them the moment they feel the urge to procrastinate, which is the entire intervention being tested. One screen covers who that person should be, and nobody who blames or moralises qualifies.
The finish line
0 / 3
The progress bar fills, the mascot throws confetti, Viskas!
