The Smile project is a new way to develop rich and interactive online experiments. Smile prioritizes modularity and reusability. Unlike tools that cater to non-programmers, Smile is designed to help reasonably competent programmers (or AI-assisted programmers) accomplish more in less time.
Highlighted features:
- 🌈 Fast and fun front-end interface development with Vue.js, Tailwind CSS, and Shadcn/vue. Create complex games, animations, and surveys with ease.
- 👩💻 Custom developer mode tools provide a novel interface for specifying and debugging interactive experiments. Quickly jump between phases and trials in your experiments, autofill forms and generate mock data for testing, hot-reload your code without restarting the entire experiment, and more!
- 🧩 Built-in support for common experiment elements like consent forms, instructions, and surveys. Just add your custom experiment logic and start collecting data.
- 🤖 Code writing is greatly accelerated using AI tools, as LLMs are trained on extensive codebases covering Vue, Tailwind, and other popular web standards used by the project.
- 👫 Supports multiple recruitment services including Prolific, MTurk, CloudResearch, and more.
- 📝 Data provenance features include an audit trail of which version of the code was used to create each data file.
- 😎 Great-looking and detailed docs, if we do say so ourselves!
Current development is happening at https://github.com/nyuccl/smile.
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Find this useful in your work? We have a plan to help you cite it!
We will eventually issue a preferred citation for the project on May 1, 2026. It will be based on the GitHub contributions list (i.e., contributions to the docs or code that hit the main branch, or noteworthy helpful interactions on GitHub discussions). The author list is open to anyone who contributes substantially.
Initial project development was supported by National Science Foundation Grant BCS-2121102 to T. M. Gureckis.