LIONESS Lab is a free web-based platform for online interactive experiments. It allows you to develop, test and conduct decision-making experiments with live feedback between participants.

LIONESS experiments include a standardized set of methods to deal with the set of challenges arising when conducting interactive experiments online. These methods reflect current ‘best practices’ for, e.g., preventing participants to enter a session more than once, facilitating on-the-fly formation of interaction groups, reducing waiting times for participants, driving down attrition by retaining attention of online participants and, importantly, adequate handling of cases in which participants drop out.

With LIONESS Lab you can readily develop and test your experiments online in a user-friendly environment. You can develop experiments from scratch in a point-and-click fashion or start from an existent design from our growing repository and adjust it according your own requirements.

No, researchers require only minimal programming skills to develop their own interactive experiments and to conduct sessions with online participants who interact via their web browsers. LIONESS Lab provides a user-friendly environment to create and edit LIONESS experiments. It includes an intuitive user interface to design experimental pages in a point-and-click fashion.

No installation is needed and programming is only required for calculations inherent to the researchers’ specific experimental design. At the same time, users with more advanced programming skills can use JavaScript to flexibly add a wide range of functionalities to their experiments.

If you already know how to program your experiments in z-Tree, using JavaScript in LIONESS Lab will be relatively easy, as programming on both platforms works in a very similar way. A useful hands-on starter guide to using JavaScript can be found here.

LIONESS Lab aims to make the development of interactive experiments as simple and intuitive as possible. Thus it provides integrated methods to address the specific logistic and methodological challenges of conducting interactive experiments with participants recruited online.

Other platforms typically do not include integrated methods to specifically facilitate online implementation of experimental designs including live interactions (measures to keep up attention, drive down attrition, adequate handling of participant dropout). In contrast to alternative platforms, using LIONESS Lab does not require you to be a proficient in programming, and does not involve substantial installation and setup times.

The use of LIONESS Lab is fully online for both researchers and experimental participants; no installation procedures are needed.

LIONESS experiments are designed to run in all modern web browsers. Participants can complete experiments on most devices with an internet connection, including laptops, tablets and smartphones. For various reasons LIONESS experiments (like many other modern web applications) do not support the Internet Explorer.

If you need help with developing an experiment please check out the extensive documentation of LIONESS Lab.

If you have more questions, support issues or would like to report a bug, do not hesitate to contact us at the LIONESS Lab forum. The LIONESS Lab Development Team will regularly check the forum and help out where possible.

classEx and LIONESS Lab build on the same technology and the interface is quite similar. If you know classEx, you also know how to use LIONESS Lab.

But the two are two separate products targeted at different aims. While LIONESS Lab is designed for online interactive experiments, classEx focuses on running experiments with a group of people which is present in one location. With classEx, you go through the experiment step-by-step and you finish an experiment by showing result graphs for a subsequent discussion (e.g. in the classroom).