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Mobile crowdsourcing: four experiments on platforms and tasks

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Abstract

We study whether the tasks currently proposed on crowdsourcing platforms are adequate to mobile devices. We aim at understanding both (i) which crowdsourcing platforms, among the existing ones, are more adequate to mobile devices, and (ii) which kinds of tasks are more adequate to mobile devices. Results of four diversified experiments (three user studies and one heuristic evaluation) hint that: some crowdsourcing platforms seem more adequate to mobile devices than others; some inadequacy issues seem rather superficial and can be resolved by a better task design; some kinds of tasks are more adequate than others; there might be some unexpected opportunities with mobile devices; and spam on the requester side should be taken into account.

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Acknowledgments

We thank the referees (especially one of them) that provided useful remarks to improve the paper, and Giorgio Brajnik and Luca Di Gaspero for their suggestions on the statistical analysis.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Udine, Udine, Italy

    Vincenzo Della Mea, Eddy Maddalena  & Stefano Mizzaro

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  1. Vincenzo Della Mea
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  2. Eddy Maddalena
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  3. Stefano Mizzaro
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Correspondence to Vincenzo Della Mea.

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Della Mea, V., Maddalena , E. & Mizzaro, S. Mobile crowdsourcing: four experiments on platforms and tasks. Distrib Parallel Databases 33, 123–141 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10619-014-7162-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10619-014-7162-x

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