Welcome to FindingFive! We are a non-profit organization — run by volunteers — with the goal of giving behavioral researchers the means to quickly and easily conduct studies on the web. To that end, we’ve compiled a list of steps you can take to become familiar with our platform and to jumpstart your research!
1. Complete our crash course.
Our two-part crash course walks you through building a very simple study from start to finish. We highly recommend you follow along with the crash course before creating your own experiment.
2. Take a look at our grammar reference.
FindingFive allows provides the potential for other features and further customization that we couldn’t cover in our crash course. All of the specifics of implementing those features are presented in our grammar reference. While you needn’t go through our grammar reference in depth before building your first FindingFive study, it’s often helpful to have it open as a reference. You can follow along with it as you create your own studies!
Note that we improve and update our grammar regularly, so please refer back whenever you want to build a new study!
3. Learn the four elements of FindingFive.
To create a study on FindingFive, you will need four elements: stimuli, responses, trial templates, and procedures.
Stimuli can be in the form of text, images, videos, and more! Stimuli refers to any items you want to display to your participants throughout your study.
Responses are buttons, rating scales, text boxes, etc. that allow participants to respond to or interact with presented stimuli. FindingFive even supports audio recordings, mouse tracking, and keypress recordings to maximize the variability of data you’re able to collect remotely!
Trial Templates are where you pair stimuli and responses into functional trials. Essentially, creating trial templates means generating sets of possible trials (stimuli-response pairings) that participants might encounter when completing your study.
Procedure is where the trials defined in trial templates are combined into a full study! This section is widely customizable and allows you to specify the flow of your study, including the number of trials presented to each participant, the order in which they are presented, and the blocking and counterbalancing structure of your study.
4. Check out our full set of tutorials!
We are constantly updating and writing tutorials on FindingFive’s features and capabilities. We have tutorials on topics like Launching a study through Mechanical Turk, Participant Grouping, and Accessing and understanding your results. You can check out a full list of our tutorials here!
5. Use one of our premade templates!
We know getting started can be the hardest part of using a new tool or platform, so we created several premade templates to lower the initial barrier of getting started on FindingFive! These templates will have starting materials for mouse tracking, conditional branching, and more. Additional templates will be added!
6. Reach out to us for help!
If you find yourself stuck while building a study, feel free to reach out to us and our community of researchers on the FindingFive Forum. The forum is both monitored by our Researcher Support team and searchable to provide quick answers to your toughest questions. If the answer to your question can’t be found on the forum, please drop us a line at researcher.help@findingfive.com. We welcome any comments and will do our best to respond quickly.
You can find most of the above-mentioned resources in the “Get Help” tab on the top right of the FindingFive Home Page.
