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Crowdsourcing User and Design Research

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Abstract

Crowdsourcing can be defined as a task, which is usually performed by an employee, that is given out as an open call to a crowd of users to be completed. Although crowdsourcing has been growing in recent years, its application to design research and education has only scratched the surface of its potential. In this chapter we first introduce the different types of crowdsourcing. Then, following the typical design cycle we present examples from literature and cases from an educational setting of how crowdsourcing can support designers. Based on these examples we provide a list of tips for utilizing crowdsourcing for design and user research activities.

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Annotated Bibliography

  • Kittur A, Chi EH, Suh B (2008) Crowdsourcing user studies with Mechanical Turk. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems, April. ACM, New York, USA, pp 453–456

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  • The authors describe an experiment in which they investigate Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and how they can get quality responses from workers

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  • Mason W, Suri S (2012) Conducting behavioral research on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Behav Res Methods 44(1):1–23

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  • The paper demonstrates how to use Amazon’s Mechanical Turk website for conducting behavioral research and tries to lower the entry barrier for researchers who could benefit from this platform

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  • McDonald P, Mohebbi M, Slatkin B (2012) Comparing Google consumer surveys to existing probability and non-probability based internet surveys. Google Whitepaper. Retrieved from http://www.google.com/insights/consumersurveys/static/consumer_surveys_whitepaper.pdf

  • Description of how Google Consumer Surveys is superior to current probability based Internet panels by using what is known as a “surveywall” to attract respondents

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  • Aitamurto T, Leiponen A, Tee R (2013). The promise of idea crowdsourcing: benefits, contexts, limitations, September 25. Retrieved from http://www.academia.edu/963662/The_Promise_of_Idea_Crowdsourcing_Benefits_Contexts_Limitations

  • The authors review crowdsourcing for idea generation (‘idea crowdsourcing’) both from the perspective of academic literature and actual cases from businesses to understand how and when to use crowdsourcing and with which benefits and costs

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Acknowledgements

We would like to extend our gratitude to all trainees of the User-system interaction (USI) program of Eindhoven University of Technology (generation 2013) for their insights into using crowdsourcing for design and user research. Moreover, we would like to specially thank the Mindswarms team for their continuous support in helping us to use their service for our educational objectives and the other aforementioned services.

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Correspondence to Vassilis Javed Khan .

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© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

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Khan, V.J., Dhillon, G., Piso, M., Schelle, K. (2016). Crowdsourcing User and Design Research. In: Markopoulos, P., Martens, JB., Malins, J., Coninx, K., Liapis, A. (eds) Collaboration in Creative Design. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-29155-0_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-29155-0_7

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-29153-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-29155-0

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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