OCTAL

User Guide for Academic Licensees

You are seeing this page because your academic licence has been approved by Oxford University Innovation. Congratulations!

Welcome and How to Contact Us

This user guide will help you get started with MiniOCTAL. You don’t need any coding knowledge, but please bear in mind that MiniOCTAL is still under development, so the instructions might not be perfectly clear. If you encounter any difficulties, please email Dr Sijia Zhao (sijia.zhao@psy.ox.ac.uk) with the subject line “MiniOCTAL Academic Licence: [Your Licence ID]”. Please include the following information in your email:

Your Licence ID: The applicant’s email: Problem:

The license ID should be in a format like “a001”. “a” stands for academic license, followed by an index number. If you don’t know your license ID. Contact the IP team or email Dr Zhao.

Getting Started with MiniOCTAL

Please follow these steps carefully to access your MiniOCTAL.

Step 1: Preparation

  • Please remember that your project ID is mini_[Your Licence ID].
  • Ensure you have access to the email inbox you used to apply for the academic licence.
  • Check that you have the following links (you should find them in your licence approval email):
  1. URL to run MiniOCTAL. It should look like “https://run.octalportal.com/mini/a001”, where a001 should be replaced by your license ID.
  2. URL to view data. It should look like “https://gitlab.octalportal.com/mini/a001”, where a001 should be replaced by your license ID.

Step 2: Run MiniOCTAL

Open the first link in any common browser on your phone. If it doesn’t work, check the following:

  • URL: Is the URL correct?
  • Browser: Is your browser up-to-date?
  • Internet: Are you connected to the internet? You should be able to start MiniOCTAL directly.

You will be asked to enter a participant ID. You can choose the format, but please avoid special symbols (especially ? or ), as this may prevent the ID from being correctly passed to the next task (⚠️you may lose the data if this happen). We recommend using a simple ID like “hc001” for easy tracking. For this initial test, you can simply enter “test” as your ID.

How to embed a Unique Participant ID in the URL?

MiniOCTAL allows you to send participants a unique URL with their ID embedded, so they can start the test without entering an ID manually. The format is: https://run.octalportal.com/mini/%5BYour_Licence_ID%5D/?pid=%5BInsert Participant ID HERE]

For example: https://run.octalportal.com/mini/a001/?pid=test

⚠️ Important: The participant ID must be URL-safe (letters and numbers only). If your ID contains special characters (e.g., spaces, punctuation, or symbols), the decoding system may alter it. In that case, the task might still run, but your data will not be saved under the correct ID and cannot be recovered.

Step 3: Checking the data

Now if you click on the second URL, you would find it’s not working. This is because it’s protected and only registered member would have access to the repository. Check the email inbox you used for the licence application. You should have received an email from GitLab inviting you to join a repository named “[Your_Licence_ID]”. Accept the invitation by following the instructions in the email (this may involve creating a GitLab/Pavlovia account if you don’t already have one). Once you open your repository on GitLab, you should see a page similar to the screenshot below. This is a private page that only you can access.

The “data” folder (circled in the screenshot) is where you’ll find your participants’ data, sorted by task. When a participant completes a task, their data will appear here immediately as a CSV file. In the example, a participant called “sijia” completed the “Survey” task at 10:33 AM on 8th November 2024. (Please note that using a participant’s name as their ID is not recommended; this is just for illustrative purposes.) In your case, as you just completed MiniOCTAL under the participant ID “test” you should see your task data saved in the folder “data”.

Step 4: Data Analysis

Data analysis tools are currently under development. Once you have collected data from a few participants, please contact Dr Sijia Zhao for guidance on analysis procedures.

[Version 1.3 on 25.09.2025]