Hi everyone, and thanks a lot for checking out statscloud! It's been a couple of weeks since I launched statscloud, and I've been really happy with the reception it's had so far. In my first blog, I wanted to explain a little about the motivation behind building statscloud, what it does at the moment, and what it will do in the future. Hold on tight.

The idea for statscloud really came to me when I was learning stats myself. I, like many people, felt slightly intimidated by the thought of becoming an expert in statistcs, after signing up to be a psychologist, and having an entire academic subject tacked on as a module. Unfortunately, the statistics software I was using didn't exactly boost my confidence either. Sure, it could do stats, but it was clearly designed for people who were already professional statisticians and knew exactly what they were doing, not humble little me who was just coming to grips with what an "ordinal" variable was.

Flash forward to today and things are very much the same. There are loads of brilliant stats apps out there already, but they all seem to have the same issue; they sort of assume everyone's a professional statistician. If you are, they're terrific but, if you aren't, and you don't hold encyclopedic knowledge of every analysis you can run, when to run them and how to interpret them, it would seem you'll need to go away and read a 100-page manual until you do.

The reality is, lots of people need to run statistical analyses, and they open up their stats packages with different backgrounds and levels of knowledge. While some of us are very experienced and have standard errors and z-scores running through our veins, some of us don't. We're also prone to forgetting what the best test to run is and have to root through a textbook or the internet to find out. Unless you run statistical analyses regularly and frequently, maintaining intricate knowledge on every conceivable analysis available to you and staying up to date on all the best practices in statistics just isn't feasible. I thought stats apps could be doing far more to help users understand exactly what they should be doing in their analyses and why.

Something that has changed over the years though is that people don't tend to use desktops and laptops an awful lot, simply because we don't need to. Many new students coming through to college and university now don't own one, and opt for using phones, tablets and Chromebooks instead. And why not? These devices can do almost everything; they can be your word processor, your camera, your entertainment centre; they can do pretty much anything you want - except, apparently, run a t-test.

That's why I created statscloud. I wanted to make something for the new generation of psychologists, social scientists, and newcomers to stats. I wanted an app that allowed users to get started with statistics really quickly and easily, made them realise exactly what they're doing and why, and didn't bog them down with lots of statistical jargon and tick-boxes along the way. I also wanted to make statscloud available and accessible anywhere, on any device, anytime. Those two things really helped shape the philosophy of statscloud. It's an app that, in the words of the slogan, makes statistical analyses open and accessible to everyone.

In total, I've spent about five years working on statscloud. When I started designing it, I made sure to throw away the rule book and forget everything I knew about the design of stats software. Therefore, statscloud, isn't based on any other statistcs package, and the interface should be completely unique. User-experience is something I became slightly obsessed with over the years, and, before I wrote a single line of code, I spent almost three years sketching out ideas for the app. I went through a small forest of paper sketches before I settled on the overall design of statscloud, but, finally, I think came up with a good, clean user-interface that makes managing and running statistical anlayses much more straightforward. Hopefully you do too!

Right now, I would call statscloud an entry-level statistics app; it's designed mainly for people who are new to statistics, and it functions as an educational tool as much as it does a stats package. Don't think statscloud is just for newcomers though; it's geared up to be a great research tool for scientists and experienced researchers too. More and more tests will be arriving in the future, including Bayesian and Equivalence tests (because everyone loves those), and there is also an option to export everything to a more advanced statistics environment (R) at any time too.

There are lots of new exciting tools coming for professional researchers too. One of these is the ability to host projects yourself and give anybody access to your whole dataset and analyses just by sharing a single link. Hosting your projects online not only makes your data more secure and easier to collaborate on, it helps comply with new standards in Open Science. By sharing a link to your project, anyone will be able to keep track of your project at any time during the data collection process. With analysis templates, you can be completely open about what analyses you're planning on running, even before you've collected any data, so it will be a great way of filing a preregistered report too.

So, there we have it. That's an overview of why statscloud exists, what it does, and where it will be in the future. While it has only just been launched, and is still in beta, I couldn't be any more excited about its future. I'm really pleased with how it's shaping up to be the go-to stats app for a new generation of psychologists - and I hope you're one of them :-)

Daniel