Messaging on Prolific is getting an upgrade! 🙌

At Prolific, our mission is to connect people to help researchers get fast, reliable data for their research. A key part of this is to make it easy for you to communicate effectively and easily to resolve issues with studies, give feedback, or just say thanks!

Many of you loved that you could message others on the Prolific platform about any single study, whether you are a researcher or a participant, but that is not to say that our messaging system was perfect 🤫. We've had so much valuable feedback and really appreciate everyone's enthusiasm in making the Prolific experience a more user-friendly one.

Thanks to this feedback, and a few weeks of grind by our awesome product team, messaging is about to get so – much – better!

So what's the hype? 🤩

For one, messaging is much easier to manage now!

There's now a single thread for each person you communicate with. Instead of having to start a new conversation each time you message the same person, you can now just reopen your previous thread with said person. This means you'll be able to see previous messages all in once place, and get a much better sense of context and continuity.

What's more, messaging formatting has also had a huge cosmetic boost 🧚‍♂️

Instead of having ">>>" in every message, you can now view all messages in chat format (think WhatsApp for research communication 👍).

Last but not least, we've dramatically improved messaging context!

What this means is that your messages will show which study they are in relation to, and you will even be able to see all the related events that take place all in the same thread! For instance, as a participant, when your submission is approved by a researcher, you will see the message "Your submission is approved" in your chat with this researcher. Neat, right?

Enough with words, why not see the new messaging system in action in this demo below? 👇

We hope you enjoy this updated messaging system! Please don't hesitate to let us know of any technical difficulties you encounter with this feature update, and we will help resolve them as soon as possible.

We'd also love to hear any feedback you may have about this update! Get in touch by Tweeting at us (@prolific) or emailing us at hello@prolific.co

Come discuss this blog post with our community!