Low-Effort Crowdsourcing

Sentence generation with choice-based typing. The program prompts a user to choose one of two words that are likely to come after the previous words, allowing them to generate a whole sentence by low-effort interaction. — programmed by Jeff Bigham

How small can a crowdsourcing contribution be?

At November’s CrowdCamp workshop, a group of us prototyped a number of sample systems to see how low-effort crowdsourcing would work. We posted a report at Follow the Crowd.

Our prototypes were silly at times, but helped us think about the mixture of low-effort input methods and non-distracting user contexts where low-effort crowdsourcing would work.

The ideas we prototyped, available at Github, include:

• A binary tweeting interface, that lets you type sentences using a choice between common words
• A passive image voting interface that captures a user’s smile as a ‘like’
• A browser extension proof-of-concept that lets a worker complete tasks while a page is load
• A hot-or-not style interface for choosing the better of two choices. The twist is that you’re choosing using affirmative grunts, so you can play it while listening (or pretending to listen?) to somebody!

Uh-huh. Yeah.

The emotive voting interface ‘likes’ an image if you smile while the image is on the screen, and ‘dislikes’ if you frown.

Details at Follow the Crowd. Team was Jeff Bigham, Kotaro Hara, Rajan Vaish, Haoqi Zhang, and myself.