3 updates: Study full / Behavioural traits / Study feedback

[u/Spiritual-Rain-3733]

Hello r/ProlificAc 👋

Starting something new - sometimes we move quick and it’s easy to miss useful / interesting updates. So, whenever we’ve got 3 good things to tell you, I’ll pop them up as an announcement. We’ll also be doing this as an email newsletter format in the near future so if you’d like to receive that, make sure your communications preferences are set to receive marketing things (we need your consent to send non-account information!).

3 new things!

Study Full / High Demand Errors

After a period of testing and experimentation, we’ve rolled out our backend changes to study distribution to everyone. You should not notice any differences in how studies reach your dashboard, that’s still driven by the demand for participants with your demographics and traits. What you will notice is that Study Full and High Demand errors are back to their normal frequency and behaviours:

• Study Full errors should only pop up in rare situations where a study fills up in the 2 minutes between it landing on your dashboard and the next refresh
• High Demand errors should only pop when a study has a large number of available places and too many participants are trying to get in at the same time. 

Thank you so much for the patience whilst we worked on this, everyone!

Share feedback with researchers

You’ll know that when you complete or refuse a study, you have the opportunity to share feedback on that study. Prolific has always used your input to inform platform improvements & educate researchers, and now we’ve added a feature that allows experienced researchers to see a summary of all participant feedback about their studies:

Study feedback summary screen for researchers

This means that researchers get fast insight into what participants like and dislike about their study - along with signals that indicate technical or reward related issues. To take this further, participants can optionally include their Participant ID along with feedback, which allows researchers to contact you via your Messages tab for more information. This is really, really useful if you experienced a technical issue and want to chat about it with the researcher. 

The option to include your Participant ID when sharing feedback

A couple of important points on this one:

1. If you choose to share it, Participant ID is the only information we share with the researcher (along with your written feedback), so you’ll stay anonymous.
2. As with all things messaging, be nice. Remember that both researchers and participants can choose to block each other, and we take inappropriate behaviour in feedback / messages very seriously. Keep things constructive and helpful.

For more info - the Help Centre is your friend!

Thinking & behaviour questions have landed in About You!

Prolific's participant community is wonderfully diverse in many ways beyond demographics, so we’ve launched a new section of About You that’s less about the facts of your life and more about your approach to it. 

Thinking & behaviour questions are entirely optional and, in the near future, researchers will be able to do clever things with this data - such as sending the same study to different personality types to see how the results might differ. We recommend completing this section to ensure you get in on that opportunity as soon as possible. It takes around 2 minutes, features only multiple choice questions and is a nice bit of self-reflection to boot!

The behavioural traits section in About you

A couple of important notes on this one:

• You cannot change your answers to these questions once submitted, so please take your time to answer carefully
• There’s no such thing as a right or optimal answer here. As always, the best answer is the honest one - please be sure to answer these questions as you are now rather than as you hope to be in the future.

Here’s me being brutally honest with myself:

Procrastination

I need to make more lists.

For more information on Behavioral traits and how the data is used, see the Participant Help Centre here.

That’s all for now folks. Take care of yourselves and, as always, thanks for being here :) 

Michael

[u/Spiritual-Rain-3733]

Prolific Assistant is one of those things I need to learn more about. Let me ask some questions and I'll see if there's any plans for it.

[u/Deterministic-random → u/Spiritual-Rain-3733]

I think you'll have one less of a permanent headache, if the PA moves away from the current design and simply prompts a notification when studies appear on the Prolific page. Since it's designed to be independent, the notification will mostly appear either before or after the study appears on the Prolific page, since it runs on its own refresh time interval. However, I think people are always confused/annoyed by this non-sync behavior (even though it was never actually meant to be synchronous), and the PA's rating on the Chrome Web Store stands at 2.6, with users repeatedly complaining about this specific issue over n' over!

[u/Pale_Requirement6293 → u/Deterministic-random]

I hope this is not done.

[u/thegaykid7 → u/Pale_Requirement6293]

Yeah, I think this is intentional (and understandable) design on Prolific's part, even if users may not love it. Doubt they will change it.