For researchers and instructors

At a glance

• Anonymous ~15-minute study in English, Spanish, and Brazilian Portuguese.
• Participation link: everydayservices.study (use ?pilot=CODE for course tracking).
• No sign-up, no accounts, no payment. Works on phone or computer.
• Participants can delete their answers at the end.
• Do not describe experimental conditions or interface variants when recruiting.

What this study is

An unsupervised online experiment measuring cognitive distance — the gap between what a digital service did and what the user believes it did — across three simulated everyday service tasks, in English, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese.

The dependent measures separate task success from comprehension deliberately, because the construct predicts that these dissociate. Completion alone cannot detect the effect being studied.

The instrument

The Cognitive Distance Index scores four dimensions into a composite running from 0, meaning strong alignment between the user's model and the system's behaviour, to 100, meaning a large gap.

The four are perceived understanding, whether people can explain what happened in their own words; predictive accuracy, whether they can anticipate outcomes before acting; interaction confidence, whether they decide without recurring hesitation; and conceptual transparency, whether they can identify why an outcome occurred.

For the classroom

The study works well as a worked example of construct operationalisation: students can experience the instrument as participants, then discuss how an abstract construct was turned into measurable items.

It is anonymous, needs no sign-up or institutional accounts, runs on a phone or a laptop, and takes about fifteen minutes. That makes it straightforward to use in a single seminar without any data-protection paperwork for the students taking part.

The participation link is the study's home page. Please do not describe the experimental design to students before they take part, for the same reason the methodology is not published here yet.

Replication and collaboration

Full methodology, conditions and results are held back while data collection is open, so that people arriving from this site are not primed before participating. They will be published in full once collection closes.

Enquiries about replication, translation into additional languages, or collaboration are welcome in the meantime. The contact address is on the privacy page.

Ethics and data handling

Participation is voluntary and can be stopped at any point. The research dataset contains no name, email, IP address or device identifier, and participants choose at the end whether their answers are kept or deleted.

Results are reported only in aggregate. Nothing in the dataset can be traced back to an individual, which is a property of what is collected rather than a promise about how it is stored.