13 April 2026
Building PsychLab.IO: A Developer Introduction and Change Log
PsychLab.IO’s public beta has been live for a week, bringing rapid iteration and over 20 impactful improvements. Here’s a look at the most important updates and the mission driving the platform forward.
As of writing, the public beta of PsychLab.IO has been live for roughly a week. Many very informative user tests have been run, leading to a multitude of changes and improvements being shipped to the platform. I would consider this first week of public access to be a success, as many quality of life changes and general improvements to functionality have been made, leading to an overall more effective research tool being produced.Prior to listing some of the more notable updates to the platform, I figured that I would use this first blog post as an opportunity to share a little bit about myself and why this platform exists. My name is Fiona, and I am the solo developer responsible for the creation of PsychLab.IO. I am an undergraduate psychology student who has a passion for open software and open science. My inspiration for creating this platform stems from my time volunteering in one of my university's psychology labs, during which, the master's student I was assisting expressed frustration towards the software she was using for creating experiments and collecting data within her research. That frustration about over-complicated tooling and unintuitive workflows stuck with me for a long time, and after my enrollment in a course about psychological research methods, I decided that it was time to create a tool that I would personally be happy to use. I created this website with the aim of making psychological research as accessible and simple as possible, as I believe that the tooling available should not be the limiting factor in conducting research.As far as the first week of the public beta is concerned, there have been roughly 20-30 large changes and tweaks which I feel have improved the platform as a whole. To prevent the list of updates shared in this blog from being incredibly long and dull, I have listed some of the most important changes which I feel made the most impact.
- When hovering over a node in the experiment editor, documentation is now shown about what the node does.
- The timeline view in the experiment editor now grows vertically to show the various cases of "if" nodes which occur at one point in time.
- Place insights on the experiment view page that allow the user to view averages of variables like reaction time and percentages for correctness of responses.
- Expand upon the feedback node and add multiple types of feedback, rather than the former iteration which just had "correct or incorrect".
- Add locks to team owned experiments so that users cannot overwrite each other's work.
Overall, I truly am looking forward to continuing to develop this platform and hopefully succeed in my goal of making psychological research available to all!