Where you land
Opening ResearchOS drops you straight into the surface that fits your role. There's no separate home dashboard to build or maintain. A lab member or solo researcher lands on the Workbench, opened to a grid of their projects. A lab head lands on the curated Lab Overview. The root URL is just a router that sends you to the right place.
The root URL is a router, not a page
ResearchOS used to open on a customizable widget dashboard at /, a canvas of tiles you pinned, dragged, and rearranged. That dashboard is gone. The root URL now renders nothing of its own. It signs you in, handles any deep link you arrived with (e.g. a task or project link someone shared), and then forwards you to the surface that owns your account type.
- A lab member or solo researcher lands on the Workbench, opened to its Projects grid.
- A lab head (PI) lands on the Lab Overview, the fixed curated page that rolls up the whole lab.
Members land on the Projects grid
For a member or solo researcher, the landing surface is the Workbench with its Projects tab selected. The grid shows a card per project with the project's color dot, a percent-complete progress bar, and small count chips (experiments, list tasks, and sequences once you have any). Click a card to open that project (see Project Surface for the Overview, Results, Methods, Goals, and Activity walkthrough). The Workbench's other tabs (Experiments, Notes, Lists) sit alongside Projects in the same view. A Check-ins tab also appears for anyone in at least one active 1:1; a lab head always sees it.
Create a project
The New Project button lives on the Projects grid. It opens the same create modal everywhere a project can be started.
- Open the Projects tab on the Workbench (it's where you already are when you land).
- Click New Project, pick a color from the swatch, and type a name (e.g. CRISPR Gene Editing Study).
- Press Create. The modal closes and leaves you right where you were, with the new card already in the grid (creating a project doesn't jump you into it). The project's color then carries through everywhere it appears, like the bar on the Gantt.
Shared projects appear here too
When a labmate shares a project with you, it surfaces in your Projects grid alongside your own. The card reads the same as any other, with its color, progress, and count chips. Whether your edits save back depends on the permission the owner granted. Edit permission writes to their copy, view permission is read-only. See Sharing and permissions for the full permission model.