Documentation

Create your study

You may have an idea for an idea for an application that our templates don't cover. Or, you may wish to extend a template with functionality not designed by the original programmer. To do this you will have to learn how to program a new Volunteer Science Application from the Application Programmer Interface (API).

This guide shows you how to create two player Volunteer Science application from scratch. Before attempting to create an application, you should be somewhat familiar with html, css, javascript, and jQuery. You may also write Volunteer Science applications in Java or Flash by appropriately calling the Volunteer Science API methods and binding to the javascript callbacks.

The quickest way to create a new application with Volunteer Science is to use one of our existing templates. Templates allow you to customize their behavior by setting parameters that control the template functionality. Should your application grow beyond the scope of the template, you may also modify the software generated by the template. To do that, you should read how to Create a study from scratch.

Deploy and Recruit Subjects

Once you have created your study, you can post it to the Volunteer Science website where anyone in the world can participate.

This guide shows you how to post your study a study to Volunteer Science and begin recruiting your first subjects.

When you post your study to the Volunteer Science website, we generate a url where users can access your study. Simply right click on the "Play" button for your study tile and select "Copy Link Location." You can sent users to that URL to take your study.

Alternatively, you can direct users to your team's webpage which you can look up here.

While you can recruit workers just using the study URL, Volunteer Science integrates directly with Mechancial Turk. All you have to do is connect your Mechanical Turk Account to Volunteer Science, code your studies to use our Mechanical Turk API, and use our online forms to create and manage your HITs. Read our guide for using Mechanical turk.

Why try to figure out how to use online ads to recruit subjects when you can you our pre-trained, pre-developed, and proven advertising for your own subjects? Volunteer Science has already figured out how to get people from all over the world to volunteer their time. All you need to do is post your study, tell us how much you want to spend on ads, what kinds of ads you want to use, and when you would want to run your ads. Our costs to recruit english speakers over the age of 18 world-wide is typically less than $0.10 per person to recruit them and less than $0.50 per completion. If you're interested in using Facebook ads, reach out to us.

Get your data

Once you have completed your study (or if you just want to analyze test data), you can download your data and experiment code directly from Volunteer Science. Check out our data export guide.

Manage your Subscription

For information on how to manage your subscription, see our FAQ.