“Am I going to be suc­cess­ful taking research online.  Are you sure it won’t be too tech­ni­cal­ly dif­fi­cult?  I’m not a com­put­er sci­en­tists and I don’t want to be!” — You, probably.

I used to have the same problem. I wanted to take my research online, but I wanted to create some­thing more complex than a survey, and I didn’t want to spend 3 months pro­gram­ming my task.

What I really wanted was a tool as easy to use as online survey tools, but more complex, more pow­er­ful, and better designed for behav­iour­al research. Maybe a bigger and better version of Survey Monkey…maybe a Gorilla.

So that’s what I set out to do. I set out to create an experiment builder easy enough to be used by anyone, from under­grads to PIs. It would allow ran­domi­sa­tion, coun­ter­bal­anc­ing, pre- and post tests. And consent. And demo­graph­ics. And the full range of tasks that behav­iour­al sci­en­tists want to create. All pos­si­ble in the same tool.

Better behavioral science will better our world

I founded Gorilla because I believe behav­iour­al science has the capac­i­ty to create and test inter­ven­tions that make people’s lives better. I want to see prod­ucts and ser­vices informed by sci­en­tif­ic research, so they actu­al­ly work. But first, we need to do the research.  And we can do more research if we get it out of the lab, reach­ing larger and more diverse samples and making it easy to test replicability.

In order to empower as many researchers as pos­si­ble, we’ve put a lot of work into making Gorilla easy to use.

Wow, I love Gorilla… Was just messing around trying to see if it could do what we needed for a project, ended up cre­at­ing an entire demo version com­plete with all coun­ter­bal­anc­ing ready for the real stimuli to be added later. It’s so intu­itive and clear.

 

- Priya Sil­ver­stein, Uni­ver­si­ty of Surrey

Gorilla isn’t just a soft­ware tool, we also provide an aston­ish­ing­ly high level of support so that you are never stuck or alone. We know how easy it is to feel feel lost in research, and we wanted to make sure that didn’t happen to our users.

In our local [Berlin] zoo a real Gorilla, Bibi, has just had babies. With Gorilla support I feel just as safe and welcome as these tiny sweet­ies do in Bibi’s arms.

 

- Katha­ri­na Kühne, Potsdam University

And it’s not just Priya and Katha­ri­na that say nice things.  You can see a whole range of tes­ti­mo­ni­als here, and more in depth spot­light inter­views with our users here.

Build tasks fast and easily

We created Gorilla to be intu­itive to anyone with expe­ri­ence of common tools like Pow­er­Point and Excel. If you can use tools with that level of com­plex­i­ty, then you’ll be fine with Gorilla.

Here’s a sneak peek of our tools to show you just how fast build­ing a task can be. (Spoiler: It’s 3 minutes.)

See, it’s easy!  You drag and drop zones, depend­ing on what you want your par­tic­i­pants to see at each stage in your experiment. If you can imagine your task and draw the main screens on a piece of paper, you’ll just be recre­at­ing that in Gorilla.

Create exper­i­ments with ease

Once you’ve created your tasks (and ques­tion­naires), you’ll use the Experiment Tree to link the ele­ments togeth­er with ease.  In the ani­ma­tion below, green nodes are ques­tion­naires, blue nodes are tasks, and orange nodes do things like coun­ter­bal­anc­ing, ran­domi­sa­tion and branch­ing.  By linking ele­ments togeth­er with arrows, it’s simple to author your protocol.

These exper­i­men­tal con­trols are often hor­ri­bly com­pli­cat­ed in code, but with the experiment tree it’s really clear what you’ve designed and easy to imple­ment. Phew!

Want to learn more? Gorilla makes complex experiment designs easy.

Can it really be easy enough for students?

We have several uni­ver­si­ties using Gorilla to teach under­grad­u­ates research methods. You can have a read of our case study with Uni­ver­si­ty College London. In a nutshell:

What we’ve managed to do with Gorilla is give stu­dents the tools and

tem­plates to make their own exper­i­ments, with minimal super­vi­sion. Stu­dents can go

out and test a hypoth­e­sis via social media. Results flood in from all over the world, and

they’re cre­at­ing this incred­i­ble range of studies. It’s a much richer learn­ing experience.”

 

- Prof Dan Richard­son, UCL

 If it’s easy enough for them, then there’s a very good change you’ll be fine too!

Are you ready to get started?

If you’re plan­ning to build a task where there are mul­ti­ple trials that par­tic­i­pants respond to, the very first thing is to go through our Task Builder Wizard which will show you the core func­tion­al­i­ty of the task builder in 10 easy steps.

If you want more of a com­plete tour, come to an Onboard­ing Webinar. In 1 hour, we’ll show you round the ins and outs of Gorilla so that you can take your research online con­fi­dent­ly. They’re live every other week, or you can watch our on demand version.

Experiment!

The best way to find out if Gorilla will work for you is to give it a go. You could even try cre­at­ing a simple experiment (for example a seman­tic priming task or the classic stroop task) in several dif­fer­ent tools, and then see which one suits you best. Running exper­i­ments isn’t only for research, it’s also for making good decisions!

Just remem­ber, with Gorilla you’re never alone. We’re here to help you do great research, and aston­ish­ing­ly good support is only ever a message away.

Yes, you can do com­pli­cat­ed things with a simple interface

Some­times we hear our clients say things like “I was sur­prised I could pull [my com­pli­cat­ed research] off, because setting it up was so easy.” (If some­body can explain to us why humans think this way, we’d appre­ci­ate it.)

Anyways, researchers have done a wide range of novel and impres­sive research and you can read about that here. Maybe someone did some­thing similar to what you are plan­ning to do?