Built by researchers, for researchers
StudyAlign grew out of our own need to run online studies, and our repeated experience re-implementing experiment infrastructure from scratch.
Why we built StudyAlign
This project resulted from our own needs of running online studies, but also from our experience re-implementing experiment infrastructure again and again. Across several projects we rebuilt the same experiment logic and logging infrastructure, the plumbing that sits between a prototype, its questionnaires, and the data you eventually analyse.
When we compared our experience to related work, we found the same pattern: researchers applied the same methods but gave little or no insight into how they implemented them. They, too, supposedly spent significant time developing software and integrating the online services surrounding their research, rather than on the research itself.
We identified this as both a challenge and an opportunity to provide a shared foundation for implementing methods in web-based studies, so researchers can focus on designing, developing, and studying interactions instead of rebuilding infrastructure.
StudyAlign lets research methods be reused across studies. Moreover, it supports our vision of letting researchers share their study designs and enable replication: study schemes can be exported and shipped as material alongside a paper. It is part of our broader vision to advance the methodological aspects of web-based HCI research.
Typical designs StudyAlign supports, including within-subject, between-subject, and interrupted time-series, built from procedure steps and counterbalanced blocks.
Who made it
StudyAlign is the work of Florian Lehmann. It was built at the University of Bayreuth, at the chair of Daniel Buschek, in particular the HCI + AI research group, which studies human-computer interaction and human–AI interaction, with a focus on interactive systems prototyped with web technologies.
Florian Lehmann
Author & maintainer of StudyAlign. Human-AI interaction researcher, University of Bayreuth.
HCI + AI research group
Chair of Daniel Buschek, University of Bayreuth. Research on human–AI interaction and intelligent user interfaces.
Read more
The motivation, system design and evaluation are described in detail in our paper. It is the best starting point if you want to understand the reasoning behind StudyAlign.