Toward Crowdsourced User Studies for Software Evaluation
This work-in-progress addresses the challenge of making user studies more accessible and efficient for software evaluation, but it is incremental as it focuses on exploring feasibility rather than presenting new results.
The paper tackles the problem of conducting software user experience studies by proposing crowdsourcing as an alternative to expensive in-lab experiments, aiming to identify which methods can be reliably crowdsourced without sacrificing the guarantees of controlled settings.
This work-in-progress paper describes a vision, i.e., that of fast and reliable software user experience studies conducted with the help from the crowd. Commonly, user studies are controlled in-lab activities that require the instruction, monitoring, interviewing and compensation of a number of participants that are typically hard to recruit. The goal of this work is to study which user study methods can instead be crowdsourced to generic audiences to enable the conduct of user studies without the need for expensive lab experiments. The challenge is understanding how to conduct crowdsourced studies without giving up too many of the guarantees in-lab settings are able to provide.