Persistence

A key concept in Smile is the idea of persistence. Persistence refers to the fact that information about the application is preserved across page reloads.

It is fairly common for participants to reload their browser window, or to close a window and reopen it at another time. In most experiment frameworks, the task begins anew when a participant does this, which can be problematic for certain research questions. Instead, Smile makes it easy to persist variables in a way that they will survive page reloads.

Persistence has several important effects on how Smile applications behave both during development and during "live" data collection.

The first is that if you reload the webpage in live or developer mode, it will tend to return to the same state as when it was left off.

If you want to "reset" the state of the app completely (removing all persistence), then press the lightning bolt icon () in the developer tools.