An open-source tool for collecting privacy-friendly computer interaction data paired with self-reports, ready to fork and deploy to your own study participants.
Most researchers who want to study how people actually work, study, and spend their time at their computers face the same challenge early on: before you can collect a single data point, you need software that runs reliably on laptops and computers, logs interaction data without being a keylogger, prompts participants for self-reports, handles participant consent and privacy, and gets the data back to you without exposing sensitive information. Building that from scratch can take months of work before the research even starts.
PersonalAnalytics exists so you don’t have to. Developed and maintained by HASEL, it’s a free, open-source desktop application built specifically for researchers who want participants to run a study client on their own machines and collect computer interaction data in a privacy-protected way. It has been used with over a thousand participants across more than a dozen peer-field studies, field experiments and lab experiments at venues like CHI, CSCW, DIS, and TSE.
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