Hardhats and Bungaloos: Comparing Crowdsourced Design Feedback with Peer Design Feedback in the Classroom
This addresses the problem of evaluating feedback methods for design education, offering insights for teachers and researchers, though it is incremental in comparing existing approaches.
The study compared crowdsourced design feedback to peer feedback in a design-oriented HCI class, finding that students perceived crowdsourced feedback as inferior in quality and fairness but noted unique positive aspects from crowds.
Feedback is an important aspect of design education, and crowdsourcing has emerged as a convenient way to obtain feedback at scale. In this paper, we investigate how crowdsourced design feedback compares to peer design feedback within a design-oriented HCI class and across two metrics: perceived quality and perceived fairness. We also examine the perceived monetary value of crowdsourced feedback, which provides an interesting contrast to the typical requester-centric view of the value of labor on crowdsourcing platforms. Our results reveal that the students (N=106) perceived the crowdsourced design feedback as inferior to peer design feedback in multiple ways. However, they also identified various positive aspects of the online crowds that peers cannot provide. We discuss the meaning of the findings and provide suggestions for teachers in HCI and other researchers interested in crowd feedback systems on using crowds as a potential complement to peers.