Using explicitly verifiable questions in Amazon Mechanical Turk questionnaires significantly increased the correlation between the article quality reviews of Wikipedia administrators and MT users. The number of valid comment submissions increased significantly, as did the median job completion time, indicating MT users were more focused and attentive. The perception of scrutiny is key to quality responses. Necessary are multiple ways of detecting suspect responses.
Reviewed by
jtth
- 2009-04-26 21:57:15
User studies are important for many aspects of the design process and involve techniques ranging from informal surveys to rigorous laboratory studies. However, the costs involved in engaging users often requires practitioners to trade off between sample size, time requirements, and monetary costs. Micro-task markets, such as Amazon's Mechanical Turk, offer a potential paradigm for engaging a large number of users for low time and monetary costs. Here we investigate the utility of a micro-task market for collecting user measurements, and discuss design considerations for developing remote micro user evaluation tasks. Although micro-task markets have great potential for rapidly collecting user measurements at low costs, we found that special care is needed in formulating tasks in order to harness the capabilities of the approach.