About MinnoJS

What is MinnoJS?

MinnoJS is an open-source free platform for conducting behavioral studies on the web. It is designed to support questionnaires and reaction-time “cognitive” tasks. It provides ready-made experiments that you can tweak with minimal knowledge in programming. Yet, some knowledge in JavaScript would help you create studies more quickly and easily.

The MinnoJS suite includes a player (runs the study on the participant’s browser), a server (saves the participants’ data), and a Researcher Dashboard (a website that allows creating studies, launching the studies, and downloading data). The MinnoJS player can run on alternative platforms (Qualtrics, Pavlovia, simple php server) instead of our dedicated server and development environment.

Is MinnoJS Free?

Yes. Our code is open-source and our products are free to install and use. However, the server and the Researcher Dashboard require a server machine (e.g., one installed by your university IT), or an account in a cloud service such as Amazon’s Web Services (AWS), or DigitalOcean.

Alternatively, you can use simpler servers. You can install a simpler php server, but that would still require your own machine, or a cloud service (e.g., AwardSpace). It is also possible to use MinnoJS to create studies that run on Qualtrics or Pavlovia. AWS, DigitalOcean, Qualtrics, and Pavlovia are not free services. But note that AWS will probably not charge you for the first year, and DigitalOcean and Pavlovia are relatively cheap, and many universities own a license to use Qualtrics.

Read more about how to run MinnoJS.

Project Implicit

The development of MinnoJS was funded by Project Implicit. Project Implicit has been using MinnoJS for running web studies since 2013. These studies have been reported in numerous publications.

Project Implicit is a non-profit organization and international collaborative network of researchers investigating group-based bias and disparities such as those based on race, gender, or sexual orientation.

The mission of Project Implicit is to educate the public about bias and to provide a “virtual laboratory” for collecting data on the internet. Project Implicit scientists produce high-impact research that forms the basis of our scientific knowledge about bias and disparity.

Project Implicit runs the famous “IAT website”. A website devoted for the demonstration of the procedures and measures used for the study of implicit social cognition. Each day, thousands of visitors participate in studies on Project Implicit’s website, using MinnoJS.