Crowdsourcing User Experience Testing
Interesting article on the Mobile User Experience blog, about how there is a growing interest in remote mobile user experience testing.
The author states that while this was a stigma once, this is changing now, with the ones wanting the UX tested going for a hybrid solution: both in-lab testing, and remote testing.
We wrote before how Mobile Crowdsourcing was a trend these days and this follows that line. With the ubiquitous of mobile nowadays, User Experience testing/crowdsourcing is an excellent example of this.
Everyone with a mobile phone a bit of time can accomplish a small task which most people are comfortable with (usability questions, user interface questions, etc), and in doing so earn something (whatever the incentives may be) and help out a company on their User Experience’s site or app.
On the article , the author mentions Mob4Hire, a company that performs this type of services, mentioning that while this doesn’t replace more in-depth studies, it is a cost-effective tool that can help smaller developers.
While mobile user experience testing is a very interesting proposition, non-mobile user experience testing is also interesting, and on this area, the most known company is Utest (which actually also does mobile apps testing), and has been growing for the last 3 years since it was founded.
Computers are equally ubiquitous in everyone’s life and using at a site or web app looking for problems and answering a survey about its usability are simple enough that almos anyone can do it and will for the right incentive, giving a great service to companies in need of it.
This is a very interesting space and, like all the crowdourcing spaces, one to keep an eye open in the future.