#HaveYourSay - Collaboration on Prolific

[Elaine]

Who We Are

Hi Researchers!

We’re the Growth Squad (our word for ‘team’). We formed just 2 weeks ago! We experiment with new ideas to improve Prolific, so that we become the platform of choice for all researchers.

Our Objective for Q2

We know that many of you have problems trying to collaborate with others on Prolific.
Our first objective is to fully understand the issues you are facing.

We Want Your Feedback On…

Collaboration on Prolific

Once we understand your problems better, we’ll aim to design experiments to see which solutions work best for you.

So, how can we make collaboration on Prolific easier for you?

[Veronica]

Hi Elaine!

I have a couple of things to propose related to the issue. Of course what I have in mind is based from my own experience, that is working with a group of people who are jointly on the same project. Therefore, it is not always the case that the actual owner of the account is the one who sets and runs the study.

• It might be the case that one needs to re-run an experiment, but using another account. Therefore, re-setting manually all the screening filters could be an error-prone activity. Of course this is not the case when you do it on the same account, since you can just copy it. So a suggestion could be to make a project “sharable”, so that also from the second account in my example, you can proceed with copying it.

• This is a suggestion that actually @Tim_Bates made me think of. I already know that you can easily transfer money from one account to another one just by sending a request to your Team. However, it could be good to think of an automatic transfer in case the two accounts are linked by some special relation, e.g co-workers, collaborators.

Hope what I write makes sense and can be of some help!
Thank you

[Elaine]

Hi Veronica!

Thank you so much for your valuable insights.

• ‘Sharable’ Study - I understand the frustration with setting all the filters up again, which is error prone task. ‘Sharable’ study or project would be indeed useful and it’s a direction we are exploring.

• Automatic money transfer - That’s interesting. Can you explain more how you think it may work in your setup specifically? And what constraints would you be worry about?

[sarnthil]

+1 to Veronica’s proposal. We have the exact same scenarios in our group. It would be awesome if at least a project would be sharable. Money transfer between accounts would also be a nice feature.

[Veronica]

• Automatic money transfer - That’s interesting. Can you explain more how you think it may work in your setup specifically? And what constraints would you be worry about?

I have some options in mind, but honestly I don’t know which may be better:

• One idea could be enabling researchers to put credits in a pool that then can be used for running new studies; so when one sets up a new study, can decide whether to finance it with the pool (indicating which one, I guess writing the specific code that identifies it) or with his/her private credits;

• Transfer of money as it exists already, but just without passing through opening a ticket; somehow making the process “automatic”. A constraint could be limiting this feature to those of the same Institute (I think it can be easily checked with the e-mail account), or simply to those who are linked by a co-working relationship (maybe this requires to implement some kind of “network” within Prolific)

• ‘Sharable’ Study - I understand the frustration with setting all the filters up again, which is error prone task. ‘Sharable’ study or project would be indeed useful and it’s a direction we are exploring.

That’s an amazing news.

Thank you!!

[Elaine]

Hi Veronica,

Thank you for your thoughts on this! We will take it to our brainstorming sessions.

If there is anything else that pops up, feel free to reach to reach out to me here!

Best,
Elaine

[Elaine]

Thank you Sarnthil, that’s useful to know that it’s impacting you as well, which will help us to prioritise.

[Veronica]

I’m very happy to hear that.

If you have any news about this point, I think the whole Community will be eager to know.

Thank you for all the work!