Crowdsourcing in UX Research
Yuxiang (Chris) Zhao, Jian Tang, Xujie Ye, Jingwen Lian · Human-Computer Interaction · 2024
User experience (UX) encompasses all aspects of how a product is sensed, felt, and used. UX cannot be designed, but is evoked by design features while users interact with the product ( Sharp et al., 2019 ). A product with good UX should achieve desirable goals (e.g., satisfying, enjoyable, engaging, etc.) and avoid undesirable goals (e.g., boring, frustrating, annoying, etc.). Understanding users plays a pivotal role in ensuring good UX, helping designers know who the users are, in what context a product is used, and what tasks the product is designed for. Knowledge about how a user feels, senses, holds, or works with a product enlightens successful interaction design. Thus, user study is indispensable at different stages of the product development life cycle. Existing UX research often adopts methods such as interviews, focus groups, expert evaluation, or small-scale surveys to gain insights into what users need, want, like, or avoid. Nevertheless, UX research employing conventional methods faces challenges such as reaching diverse user samples, gathering a wide range of user perspectives, and accelerating the speed of user testing.