As you build out your Tines stories, you may need user interaction mid-process for tasks like reviews, action validation, or confirmations. Combining the PROMPT function with Condition actions and delays is a useful pattern for these scenarios.

Before getting started, we recommend familiarizing yourself with the functionality this article covers:

Prompts in Tines enable user interaction within your stories. Testing prompts ensures they function correctly, letting you verify user responses.

In this video, we show how to set up a PROMPT function within a Send Email action for a user to interact with (we emulate the interaction by pasting the PROMPT URL into a browser).

Since the PROMPT function enables feedback loops, we recommend adding a Condition action immediately after the prompt action to validate clicks. Without this, the story may continue unchecked.

In this video, we set up a Condition action to check if the PROMPT URL was clicked by the end user.

To maintain the efficiency and accuracy of your story flow, it's important to remove duplicate submissions. Deduplication prevents repetitive actions and ensures that your automation only processes unique entries.

In this video, we walk through adding deduplication to a PROMPT flow.

If the Condition action's criteria isn't met, we can add a delay so the user has time to click the PROMPT link. In a real-world example, users aren't going to have zero seconds to click on something before action is taken.

In this video, we create a delay with seconds. You can always increase the delay as you develop stories for production.

Whenever you have situational logic that relies on user interaction, it's good to do a final check.

In this video, we see what happens if the user clicks the link and how the delay event data flows through (or stops at) the deduplication action.