Ask Me or Tell Me? Enhancing the Effectiveness of Crowdsourced Design Feedback
This addresses a specific issue in crowdsourced design feedback systems, offering an incremental improvement for designers seeking more useful feedback.
The paper tackled the problem of overly positive or negative sentiment in crowdsourced design feedback reducing its effectiveness, and found that combining questions with statements led to more neutral sentiment and better design revisions.
Crowdsourced design feedback systems are emerging resources for getting large amounts of feedback in a short period of time. Traditionally, the feedback comes in the form of a declarative statement, which often contains positive or negative sentiment. Prior research has shown that overly negative or positive sentiment can strongly influence the perceived usefulness and acceptance of feedback and, subsequently, lead to ineffective design revisions. To enhance the effectiveness of crowdsourced design feedback, we investigate a new approach for mitigating the effects of negative or positive feedback by combining open-ended and thought-provoking questions with declarative feedback statements. We conducted two user studies to assess the effects of question-based feedback on the sentiment and quality of design revisions in the context of graphic design. We found that crowdsourced question-based feedback contains more neutral sentiment than statement-based feedback. Moreover, we provide evidence that presenting feedback as questions followed by statements leads to better design revisions than question- or statement-based feedback alone.