How One User Automated a Research Study with IronWorker and Twilio (a repost from Usability Panda)

Katarzyna Stawarz, a PhD student at University College London, wrote a really nice blog post on using Twilio and IronWorker to communicate via SMS. She was conducting a study that tested a method of habit formation research and needed a way to send out reminders to participants at specific times during the day, every day, for 4 weeks.

Originally, Katarzyna was going to do it manually but then decided to dust off her programming skills and automate the whole thing. Brilliant!

She used Twilio for the SMS, of course, along with IronWorker for scheduling and async processing and after a just a bit of coding, she was up and running in no time flat – receiving and responding to several thousand study responses and managing 1,000+ reminders.

Katarzyna explains as to just how easy it was to use IronWorker with Twilio:

I needed a process running on my server to fire up reminders at a specific time and since I haven’t touched servers and their settings for at least 6 years, I wasn’t very keen to suddenly do that. So I used IronWorker to trigger my Twilio code. It was free and surprisingly easy to use, with everything nicely explained.

Here’s another quote we couldn’t pass up.

Twilio + IronWorker (with code!)

If you want to run a study that requires sending or receiving SMS (or both!), the Twilio + IronWorker combo is a great solution. It’s easy to set up and affordable. One of my colleagues already re-used my code to run her study (although she triggered her messages manually) and was quite happy with the tech. So yay for Twilio and iron.io 🙂

To read more about Katarzyna’s use case, visit her blog Usability panda or find her on twitter @falkowata!

To learn more about how IronWorker can help your app effortlessly perform work in the background asynchronously, please visit Iron.io today.