Preparation

For the different levels of information mentioned above, a varying setup is required. The Participant Variables Tab gives potential for customization of the chat. In here three variables can be defined, the color of the text (Text Color Variable Name), an avatar (Avatar Variable Name) that will be shown next to the participants messages as well as in the list of participants and a nickname (Nickname Variable Name). If no nickname is entered, the participant labels (P.1, P.2…) will be shown instead. To make all these possibilities work, the context for the related variable has to be selected and, if an option should not be used it may be disabled as well.

Interaction Chat - Participant Variables

To make these configurations work, the values for the variables need to be set within the experiment. If the Text Color Context is set to Participant Everywhere and the Text Color Variable Name is interactionTextcolor, a variable could be set through $variableApi->setPE('interactionTextcolor', 'red') in any previous step. An example for the configuration of the variables is displayed in the screenshot below. These are the values used, to get the result that are displayed in the Interaction section.

Interaction Chat - Set Values