Can Crowdsourcing Improve HCI?

Published

June 18, 2011

Author(s)

Serge M. Egelman

Abstract

Much of HCI research focuses on improving the user experience by using data from human subjects experiments. Designing a laboratory study, observing participants, and compensating them is a very expensive process, in terms of both time and money. Due to these costs, sample sizes tend to be relatively small, which in turn has an effect on the estimation of exact effect sizes. However, new crowdsourcing technologies, such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, allow researchers to conduct human subjects experiments in much less time, on much larger sample sizes, and for less money. In this paper I describe several previous studies that I have performed using crowdsourcing—some prior to joining NIST—and explain how they would have been time and cost prohibitive without crowdsourcing technologies.

Proceedings Title

Proceedings of The Human Computer Interaction Consortium (HCIC) 2011 Workshop

Conference Dates

June 14-18, 2011

Conference Location

Monterey, CA

Conference Title

The Human Computer Interaction Consortium (HCIC) 2011 Workshop

Pub Type

Conferences

Keywords

Crowdsourcing, HCI methods, user studies

Citation

Egelman, S. (2011), Can Crowdsourcing Improve HCI?, Proceedings of The Human Computer Interaction Consortium (HCIC) 2011 Workshop, Monterey, CA (Accessed October 31, 2024)