Setting up your Simulator

Slider groups and sliders form the building blocks of your Simulator.

A slider group is a category (such as 'Business' in the example below). Each group contains sliders ('Building digital skills', 'Helping new businesses' and 'Creating new opportunities' in the example below). Your participants use sliders to adjust the budget or points in your Simulator. Slider increments are the amounts to which a respondent can adjust each slider.

Screenshot of a slider group

Before you start, think carefully about the number of groups, sliders and increments you'll add to your Simulator. It's possible, for example, to have a maximum of 11 increments on any one slider, but using this many could make for a less than ideal user experience.

You might find it helpful to use our Simulator template to gather all of the information you need and create a structure for your Simulator.

Slider groups

Add the groups first. When you add a new group you also choose the type:

In a budget Simulator you'll choose from an expenditure group (representing services that cost money) or an income group (representing revenue-generating services).
In a points Simulator you can choose to ask your participants to either earn or spend points.

You'll then set the slider increments for each group. This scale is set per group, although you can vary it from group to group.

Sliders

The next step is to add a slider to the group, along with a title and description.

Screenshot of a slider title, Building digital skills, and a description: Digital skills are already essential in many jobs, and most jobs in the future will require them. By helping people to build these skills, we'll enable them to access a wider range of career information, and to ultimately access a wider range of career options.

This description is readable by your participants if they select the 'i' symbol to the left of the slider title.

Screenshot of the 'i' symbol located next to the slider title, Building digital skills.

If you've got a Budget or Bill Simulator, you'll need to enter the previous year's spend or income on this particular slider item (so in this example, how much was spent on building digital skills). This will contribute to the overall total shown on your Simulator.

Finally, you'll enter the consequences of each incremental change to the slider. Effective consequences are specific and accurate. Making your consequences realistic will bring the subject of your Simulator to life for your respondents, and will help them to understand the difficult choices your organisation has to make.

Repeat the process for additional sliders.

Points to note

You must add all of your sliders before you open the Simulator up to responses. Adding sliders after the Simulator is open will cause an error in your response exports.

Any test data you add must also be removed before you open the Simulator.

Download the Simulator template (.xlsx 10 KB)