Run online studies
with functional prototypes.
StudyAlign lets researchers build, run, and log web-based user studies, from the study procedure to interaction logging, without re-implementing experiment infrastructure every time.
From your inputs to structured interaction data
You bring a prototype, your questionnaires and a study design. StudyAlign runs the procedure for participants and logs everything to a backend you control.
Functional prototype
Your web app or prototype, instrumented with the StudyAlign library.
Questionnaires
Built with the native questionnaire builder, or Qualtrics as an external alternative, embedded into the flow.
Study design
Procedure, conditions and counterbalancing, set up in the Admin Panel.
StudyAlign
The backend, admin panel, study frontend and logging library orchestrate the procedure and serve it to participants.
Guided participation
Participants move through the study one controlled step at a time.
Interaction logs
Mouse, keyboard, touch & custom events persisted to your database.
Shareable study schemas
Export & import study designs to reuse, replicate and publish as material.
The software components of StudyAlign
Together they cover the important aspects of running an online study.
Backend
Stores studies, participants and interaction logs, and exposes the API.
Admin Panel
Design studies, build procedures and manage participants in the browser.
Study Frontend
Guides participants through the procedure, one controlled step at a time.
Logging Library
Captures mouse, keyboard, touch and custom events inside your prototype.
Everything you need to run a web study
StudyAlign covers the whole pipeline: designing the procedure, integrating prototypes, collecting data, and sharing your design.
Build studies in a UI
The Admin Panel supports many study designs. Edit procedures interactively with a setup wizard and pick parts for counterbalancing.
Integrate any prototype
A TypeScript library plugs into your existing React or vanilla web prototype to hook into StudyAlign and browser-event logging.
Interaction logging
Persist native mouse, keyboard and touch events plus custom data objects, added from inside prototypes as simple one-liners.
Guided participant flow
The Study Frontend takes participants through the study end to end, controlling the flow so they proceed one step at a time.
Import & export studies
Share study schemes as JSON. They work well as supplementary material for papers and support future, replicable research.
Keep track over time
Teams see a history of past studies and can reuse and evolve their designs across projects, so nobody starts from scratch.
Take a test study for a spin
We have set up a live test study so you can experience StudyAlign from the participant's side: work through a functional prototype, answer a short questionnaire, and see how the study frontend guides you one controlled step at a time. No account needed.
Test as a participantA native questionnaire builder
StudyAlign comes with a simple but powerful questionnaire builder, so you can create surveys and wire them straight into your study procedure, no separate account required. Prefer an external tool? Qualtrics integrates as an alternative.
Get started faster with ready-made questionnaires you can adapt:
- Blank
- NASA-TLX
- UEQ
- System Usability Scale
SoonQualtrics templates coming soon
Studies run with StudyAlign
StudyAlign has enabled peer-reviewed studies published at major HCI venues.
Collaborative Document Editing with Multiple Users and AI Agents
Exploring Mobile Touch Interaction with Large Language Models
Content-Driven Local Response: Mobile Email Replies With and Without AI
Writer-Defined AI Personas for On-Demand Feedback Generation
The AI Ghostwriter Effect: Ownership of AI-Generated Text
Beyond Text Generation: Continuous Automatic Text Summaries
Choice Over Control: Writing with LLMs via Diegetic & Non-Diegetic Prompting
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Read the paper
StudyAlign is described in a peer-reviewed publication that details the system and its design.
StudyAlign: A Software System for Conducting Web-Based User Studies with Functional Interactive Prototypes
Florian Lehmann and Daniel Buschek · University of Bayreuth · ACM (2025) · DOI 10.1145/3733053
StudyAlign is open source
The whole platform, including the backend, admin panel, study frontend and library, is open source and self-hostable. Fork it, run your own instance, and contribute back.
View on GitHub