Before our dev team wrote a single line of code, we held a series of design meetings over a period of eight months. Now that SuperLab 5 has been out for 20 months, it is useful to step back and ask: did the new features hit the mark? The answer is a resounding “Yes”!

The anecdotal evidence is all over the place. Longtime SuperLab users are delighted at the wider (much wider) range of experiments that can now be built, and many who had abandoned SuperLab for E-Prime are now coming back. Researchers tired of messing with E-Basic are pleasantly surprised to discover that they no longer have to.

The empirical evidence confirms it. I looked at the questions posted on our community forums. For SuperLab 4, I looked at the 12 months up to Sept 30, 2013, when the upgrade was released. For SuperLab 5, I looked at the last 12 months. The figures are stark: the number of posted questions dropped by 46%, a drop in tech support load that other companies would kill for:

Qualitatively, the numbers are even more impressive. I went through each forum post during these two periods and tallied the outcomes to try and answer a simple question: was there a drop in inquiries where the user had to be told that it’s beyond SuperLab’s capabilities? Again, the answer is a firm “yes”, with a 50% drop.

Design Matters

An incredible amount of thinking went into SuperLab 5’s design. We have added many new features in the upgrade, but more importantly, we also took the time to simplify existing features. The overall user experience simply feels better while packing a power punch.

Back to Blog main page