Toward Crowdsourced User Studies for Software Evaluation

This work-in-progress paper describes a vision, i.e., that of fast and reliable software user experience studies conducted with the help from the crowd. Commonly, user studies are controlled in-lab activities that require the instruction, monitoring, interviewing and compensation of a number of participants that are typically hard to recruit. The goal of this work is to study which user study methods can instead be crowdsourced to generic audiences to enable the conduct of user studies without the need for expensive lab experiments. The challenge is understanding how to conduct crowdsourced studies without giving up too many of the guarantees in-lab settings are able to provide.