Crowdsourcing Platforms: Users’ Experience Exposed

Crowdsourcing is one of many ways that companies use to access a wide and varied range of resources that combined can generate superior performance. Our exploration tries to answer the question of how can a platform be effectively designed to attract and stimulate participant’s engagement. To address this inquiry, we selected two crowdsourcing platforms and compared the users’ experience from six perspectives: attractiveness, confidentiality, accuracy, usability, interaction and accessibility. The subjects were asked to perform some predefined tasks on the selected platforms. Their behavior was recorded using an eye-tracking device, which offered information about eye positions and movements during tasks. Visual behavior records were enriched with talk aloud protocols. This additional research method was used to understand subjects’ expectations, feelings and reasoning while executing the required tasks. After analyzing users’ experience from proposed perspectives, what seems to matter mostly when choosing a crowdsourcing platform, is – first of all - the platform’s design and secondly their own website navigation skills. Crowdsourcing platforms may attract or lose potential contributors with different capabilities just by modifying their website templates, by means of how information is presented. Nevertheless, a single website template could not satisfy all needs. Therefore, different abilities a user might have will influence him to select a crowdsourcing platform that match their way of thinking.