Onboarding flows
An onboarding flow is the journey someone completes to join your study. Each audience gets one flow — you’ll usually build the participant one first — and you can edit it at any time; changes apply to everyone who starts the flow from then on.
If an audience has no flow at all, joiners are accepted instantly, with no questions asked. That’s fine for pilots; most real studies want at least a consent step.
Step types
A flow is an ordered list of steps. There are four kinds:
- Consent — shows a published consent statement. The joiner must tick the agreement box (and type a signature, if the statement requires one) before continuing. See Consent.
- Form — collects dictionary fields through a profile form. Answers are written straight into the joiner’s record.
- Survey — runs one of your surveys as part of joining, typically for screening. You can attach a screen-out condition: joiners whose answers match it are screened out and shown your screen-out message.
- Approval gate — pauses the journey until someone on your team approves. Joiners wait at “awaiting approval”; you approve or reject them from the Participants page. You can add instructions telling them what happens next.
A typical order: consent → registration form → screening survey → approval gate. There’s no separate “auto-approve” step — completing the final step of a flow with no gate is approval.
Where the answers go
Flow answers aren’t stored off to the side: form steps write values directly into the joiner’s study record, consent steps record a versioned acceptance, and survey steps create a normal survey response linked to the flow. By the time someone finishes onboarding, their record is already populated.
Testing a flow
The Test flow button walks you through the flow exactly as a joiner would see it — real consent text, real form fields, working screen-out logic. It’s preview only: nothing you enter is saved and nobody is enrolled, so test as often as you like.