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Profile Field Types & Best Practices

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Chronus provides a variety of field types for building your user forms and profile questions. This article details the different field types available, and best practices for their deployment.

Text Entry

This is a simple single line text input.  You can also allow users to enter multiple responses, each of which will appear as a separate field. Ideal for responses which do not exceed 60 characters, to collect information like Department, Phone Number, etc.

Example of a text field with only one response allowed:

Multi line

This is a multiple line text input for users to enter longer entries that span multiple lines. Ideal for responses that exceed 60 characters, to collect information like About Me, Other Details, etc.

Example:

We recommend providing additional guidance for filling out fields such as "About Me" should you choose to include them in a profile.

For example, in the field description, instruct users to talk about their top three interests or what they hope to achieve from the program, as well as suggesting a character limit, such as 300 characters; doing this helps prevent users from getting analysis paralysis and increases the likelihood of the field being filled out.

 

Pick multiple answers

This field type allows you to create a predefined list of choices for users to select. There are two different ways to include the choices, individually or in bulk.

Individually: Enter your first choice and click on the '+' icon to add the second choice. To insert an item in a specific location in the list, select the '+' icon next to the choice that you want your new item to appear underneath.

In bulk: Click on "Bulk add" to add your choices with commas separating each choice.

Optionally, you can also allow users to select "Other" and type in a different answer.  To allow this option, include "Allow user to specify a different answer" at the end of your list of choices. You can also add a description of the question in "Field description."

Below is an example of what the end user experience will look like for a "Pick Multiple Answers" type of field:

Alternatively, you can restrict end users to selecting just one choice from a multiple-choice list. Use the field type "Pick One Answer". Below is an example of the end user experience for this field type.

 

 

Tip: Provide the list of choices in alphabetical order for users to easily identify the choices. Only multiple choice questions can be used in the matching algorithm.

 

Ordered options

This field type allows you to create a list of predefined choices for users to rank their choices in order of preference. You will need to specify the number of choices the user can select. For example, you may want the users to rank their top 3 preferences from a list of 15 options.

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This view of the editor may help you visualize how to formulate this field:

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Tip: Provide the list of choices in alphabetical order for users to easily identify the choices. Ordered Options fields are ideal to include in the matching algorithm.

 

Education, Experience, Publication

These field types provide a pre-formatted set of fields to capture the user's work, academic experience, or works they have published.

  • Experience - Work data includes organization name, job title and time period.
  • Education - Academic data includes school name, degree, major, graduation year.
  • Publications - Data includes title, publisher, publication date, publication url, author, and description.

Each one is an individual field type so you need to set up education, experience and publication fields individually. It’s not required to use all three of them; most programs use only Experience and Education. Certain academic programs may wish to utilize the Publications field type.

Additional Details:

  • You can allow users to provide either only the most recent job or school, or to provide all the jobs and schools.
  • If you choose to use these fields, note that you cannot modify their design. For example, you can't remove Degree or Major from the education field—the format is fixed.

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Skype

This field type is used to capture users' Skype log-on credentials. This allows the user to initiate a Skype chat or video call from within the mentoring area. 

Clicking the user's Skype name will initiate a call with them using the default version of Skype that is on their device. If the user cannot be reached, that user needs to check their privacy settings to ensure that incoming calls from people not on their call list are accepted.

 

Manager

The "Manager" field will ask the end user to enter the following details about their manager: first name, last name, and email address. You can label the manager field free-form as you can with any field, so you can label it "Direct manager" or whatever makes the most sense for your organization and program. The advantages of using the Manager field are twofold:

  1. You can use it to prevent manager matching (just ask a Chronus success team member to enable that setting), meaning the system will automatically avoid recommending someone's manager as their mentor.
  2. You can use it to automatically email their manager when they apply to join the program. This will alert the manager that their direct report has applied to join. Some programs use this to instate an "opt out" policy where a manager can escalate if they are not okay with their direct report participating.

 

Location

This field type provides an auto-format location field for identifying user location (City, State, Country). As the user starts typing their city, the system will automatically display matches for the user to select from. 

Note that this field can fill in full addresses. We highly recommend that you provide context to users using the Field description to ensure that your participant provide only the information needed in a particular format.

An example for the United States could be: Seattle, WA, United States

Tip: Using this field type maps out a demographic report of users which can be found under Reports.

 

Upload File

This field type allows users to upload a file such as a resume, essay or form. The user will simply see a "Choose File" button instead of an answer field.

Upload Rules:

  • Allowed file types are pdf, doc, xls, ppt, docx, pptx, xlsx
  • Maximum file size allowed is 2 MB.

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