Crowdsourcing for Usability Testing
This work provides a practical solution for web designers and developers seeking affordable usability testing, though it is incremental in adapting existing crowdsourcing tools to this domain.
The study investigated using crowdsourcing platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk for remote usability testing to address the high cost and time of traditional lab methods, finding that crowdsourcing offers significant cost savings and quick turnaround while acknowledging some limitations compared to lab settings.
While usability evaluation is critical to designing usable websites, traditional usability testing can be both expensive and time consuming. The advent of crowdsourcing platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk and CrowdFlower offer an intriguing new avenue for performing remote usability testing with potentially many users, quick turn-around, and significant cost savings. To investigate the potential of such crowdsourced usability testing, we conducted two similar (though not completely parallel) usability studies which evaluated a graduate school's website: one via a traditional usability lab setting, and the other using crowdsourcing. While we find crowdsourcing exhibits some notable limitations in comparison to the traditional lab environment, its applicability and value for usability testing is clearly evidenced. We discuss both methodological differences for crowdsourced usability testing, as well as empirical contrasts to results from more traditional, face-to-face usability testing.