Crowdsourcing in Interface Development - Essay Example

? Crowdsourcing in Interface Development Crowdsourcing in Interface Development Crowdsourcing means involving a number of people in a single project, though the definition may vary from use to use. On the other hand, the main idea behind crowdsourcing is that it is an activity aimed at tapping into the collective intelligence and capabilities of a community towards completing tasks that a company could have otherwise performed by itself or used a third party. This means that free labor may also be part of the crowdsourcing concept. In a business, crowdsourcing will allow managers to tap into a wide talent and expertise pool while at the same time learning about the basic needs of the very customers the business tries to satisfy. Today through crowd sourcing, the company can use a huge number of less technical people to carry out complex and highly ingenious tasks at very low costs. As a result, the basic idea behind crowdsourcing is to increase productivity while at the same time reducing involved costs in the production process (Mau, 2004). This involves the use of internet where the company solicits feedback from a community of many active and passionate people, which will help the company in significantly reducing the time that it would take to collect data about the same information in the field through a research or other formal focus groups. Therefore, by having customers involved in the branding activities, marketing and the product design and development processes, the organization can greatly save on the staffing costs required and cater for the numerous risks and uncertainties in the market place (Mau, 2004). History The process of requiring customers to have an input in developing products is not new. However, open-source software has changed the approach by making it possible for many people to be involved in such a process. In today’s technology, it is possible to have numerous people undertake tasks that would seem too complex for their level of technical knowledge, mainly driven by factors such as the development of blogs social networks such as Facebook, twitter, MySpace and YouTube. This has made the traditional differences producers and consumers to vanish and leave a thin line that becomes hard to isolate, leading to a market that has a collective intelligence (Brabham, 2008). In other words, in the market today, it is possible to access people’s passion, knowledge, their creative ideas and insightful thinking. This translates to improved production and increased innovations numerous minds are brought together in an economy driven by intellectuals. Open source code, the invention of Stallman an MIT graduate that dates back to 1983 has made crowdsourcing in the IT a great success and has helped companies to reap big from crowdsourcing. This led to development of Unix operating system by 1991 where the developer Linus Torvalds, a computer scientists based in Finland requested ideas from people on how to develop a free operating system, which led to the current Linus operating system, which is the globally largest and world most successful open code software today (Howe, 2008). In interface design, users create socially adaptable interfaces that address interface complexity where users come up with customizations linked to specific tasks, which are then made available to an online community through an online repository. Once the users have created a collection of test sets, the users then customize the interfaces created with a keyword search in finding and installing specific task sets, resulting to a situation where users can issue direct commands to the interface. Therefore, crowdsourcing has its origin from academic researchers who designed digital resources that supported research and data interpretation methods, which involved visualization of data, computational analysis, data mining and simulations (Oomen & Aroyio, 2011). Consequently, in interface design, the result was that users were henceforth able to automate difficult tasks to compute, which involved categorization of data, duplicating the data online, categorizing the data and audio transcription. For instance, services such as the ones offered in Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and the Mobile Works are used to solve tasks in a similar manner through micro-tasks, which are general tasks requiring seconds to complete and are completed by a huge pool of on line agents who in return have to be paid (Gutheim & Hurtmann, 2012). Consequently, in development of complex interfaces that allow users to micro-task, four main types of crowd sourcing interface design have emerged. These are: Discovery and management of knowledge such as in Peer-to-peer community patent review, the thread less peer-vetted productions, distributed human intelligence such as in the Amazon’s Turks and Micro-tasking and finally the broadcast search, an example being the innocentive approach (Tee, Leiponen & Aitamurto, 2011). Impacts of crowd sourcing on interface design Crowdsourcing has virtually changed the way interface developers have to do business today. The approach is a casual but powerful means through which interface developers can reach users in developing a long-term success in interface and other developments. Various companies such as Dell and Microsoft today have considerably applied crowdsourcing in most of their interface developments with amazing results. As discussed, crowdsourcing is the way in which a developer has to tap in the world of infinite ideas in helping them to work through a design in record speeds. A business outsources bits of the required interface development task to a large crowd of developers and other technical people. The greatest impacts is that crowdsourcing will bring about interesting inventions at significantly no costs, or at much lower costs compared to other development methods. In addition, the process ensures developed product is specifically what users need. People have a rich wealth of creativity, which they are ready to share when given the right opportunity. An example is the powerful community that comes together with a common mission and has to post their creative designs and other suggestion towards building a solid whole. Therefore, companies benefit largely from a rich and infinite pool of ideas and innovations, pushing interface development to a higher level. Companies such as Inno Centive, IdeaScale, and WhyzeGroup among others have specialized in creating such communities to tap into the wide variety of talents and ideas from members, the result of which is development and creation of more powerful tools at a much-reduced budget (Howe, 2008). It is a way through which a company can push through a highly innovative idea through mass collaboration and innovations to remain competitive. Companies that have used crowdsourcing in interface development such as Microsoft are today the market giants with robust market segments that have continuously insulated them from the competitive forces in the market, an advantage obtained through crowdsourcing. Today Inno Centive has become the center of problem solution where organizations are turning to across the globe to find answers to pertinent questions and for research based answers. With over 140, 000 scientists and with its operations in more than 170 countries, the company has made crowdsourcing in development of interfaces and other products reliable and efficient. Currently, leading firms such as Procter and Gamble, DuPont and BASF have continued to post difficult problems that their in-house research may not deal with in Inno Centive, with rewards ranging from between $10,000 to $100,000 for anyone who solves such problems (Howe, 2008). The results are great success in obtaining solid facts and research based answers in the shortest time possible and at much reduced cost. Consequently, these companies do offer innovative and quality products compared to their competitors in the market. Currently, the idea behind open source code has made major breakthroughs in research-based software and interactive interfaces, with companies benefiting largely from crowdsourcing though the use of open source codes (Howe, 2008). Open source code operates on the same principle as crowdsourcing; however, it not considered as crowdsourcing as it involves allowing access to the basic source codes that make the product in software development, allowing developers to change the configuration of the product to their own tastes (Brabaham, 2008). In crowdsourcing, such privileges are not possible, but the company chooses among the best proposals to develop from the community. Wikipedia the largest open contribution site today operates in the same principle where both professionals and novice internet users have posted millions of articles today. In addition, another impact of crowdsourcing is observed in the latest attempt by NASA to invite the public to contribute by showing images of Mars in in their database collected from the Viking missions. The interested individuals were required to measure landforms in provided images. Surprisingly, NASA found that the task was successfully completed within a month when crowd sourced. The same task according to NASA would have taken a geological expert over two years to complete with a similar level of accuracy (Howe, 2008). Today, NASA has undertaken to use crowdsourcing in investigating images collected by its orbiting vehicles than using its experts to undertake these tasks. These are all the great ways in which crowdsourcing has imparted originations and system developers today. Benefits of Crowdsourcing on Interface design Crowdsourcing has had elaborate effects in the field of interface design with numerous companies adopting the use of crowdsourcing in developing their interfaces and other tasks. One of the main benefits is that crowdsourcing in interface design helps the company to interact more closely with customers. For instance, Dell’s Idea Storm is the best form of crowdsourcing in interface design where the company is involved in co-creation with potential users in virtual collaboration environments (VCE) (Tee, Leiponen & Aitamurto, 2011). At the beginning of 2011, the company had over 15,400 possible development suggestions, 91,000 reviews and comments and 740,000 votes. Through the system, users are able to contribute ideas to the business platform about coming up with new products or possible modifications on the existing ones. Such suggestions are improved, voted and comments appended by other community members. In Dell, it was found that the main decision select an idea on how to improve its system and interfaces depended on the technicality of the idea and the extent to which dell could simplify such technical details to arrive at a systematic innovation. Consequently, the decision on whether to accept or reject the innovations in Dell is mainly driven by pressure from the user community and reasoning in the company. The amount of data that such community offers to reduce the complexity of the innovation is necessary in reducing ambiguity, towards bridging the gap between the company and the users (Tee, Leiponen & Aitamurto, 2011). Consequently, in developing such successful innovations, Dell has to have an understanding of the behaviors of users among the virtual communities to gain benefits from their efforts. This brings customers closer to the company, enabling company to develop interfaces that the users have contributed, which makes such users to feel part of the company. This strategy is partly behind the impressive pool of Dell’s innovations. Another benefit that comes with crowdsourcing in interface design is improved and evidence based planning. In crowdsourcing, the virtual groups consist of millions of both non-technical and professional users. For instance, in the case of dell above, the online community produces numerous designs where members vote for the best ones. The result is numerous varieties of interfaces that are available for the company to choose. When open method is used in such interface designs, both the professionals and armatures are able to hand in their prospective designs, which offer the company a large pool of possible designs to choose from. However, in such interface development, the firm has to be clear on what is intended. This means that the company has to outline on whether new products have to be designed or whether the company is aimed at harnessing more refined ideas to improve an existing interface, which helps the company to utilize co-creation as a critical approach in the value chain (Tee, Leiponen & Aitamurto, 2011). This has become the major initiative in crowdsourcing planning and in development of new interfaces, where companies are able to come up with ingenuous invention with much ease. In some cases, the ideas and designs proposed by less technical people have proved to be of much importance compared to those suggested by a technical staff (Tee, Leiponen & Aitamurto, 2011). This makes it necessary for the company to consider all the suggested designs in coming up with the best interface design for a project. In a study on the effectiveness of crowdsourcing in problem solving, it was found that in solving research and development problems, openness in crowdsourcing, which leads to heterogeneity is the basic component that leads to better outcomes (Gutheim & Hartmann, 2012). In addition, ideas that are built on cumulative knowledge based on innovations and past advances have proved critical in development of successful platforms in interface design. The major benefit in using crowdsourcing in interface design is in cost and time reductions. Traditionally, companies used to spend many months and huge budgets in researching and developing as well as testing a certain interface on its effectiveness. In addition, such developments were mainly based on professionals’ perceptions in such firms and in some cases failed to capture the needs of users in the market (Gutheim & Hartmann, 2012). Some firms have suffered major losses in development of expensive interfaces that proved not to work as expected. These factors made development of new interfaces a difficult and expensive task, making companies to fail in taking advantage of quality interfaces. These were believed to be a preserve of large organizations with huge capital outlays to develop and research. However, with crowdsourcing, the problem has been completely solved, with companies being presented with numerous possibilities from which to choose from in developing a new interface. Such developments may be based on actual data on the ground where a virtual community is used and the design based on their ideas, designs and comments Dell has predominantly used this approach in the Idea Storm platform with massive cuts on budgets and time required to develop or improve on any interface. Small companies today can as well utilize the benefits of crowdsourcing with minimal budgets incurred in the process. The result has been ingenious ideas that have improved interface design to unimaginable levels. For instance, Bernstein et al proposed and developed Soylent, which is a powerful processing tool that shortens, edits and proofreads documents through crowdsourcing, which took considerably much lesser time and reduced budget (Gutheim & Hartmann, 2012). The result was that in integrating Soylent to Microsoft Word, the researchers provided a highly complex service by using a simplified approach that would hide the complexities of error control, specification of tasks and the use of turnaround times. Moreover, a better and powerful tool to help the visually impaired was designed through crowdsourcing in providing a simple application that was named VizWiz (Gutheim & Hartmann, 2012). The application allows users to attach a photo of an object and receives answers from crowdsourcing platforms in real-time. Consequently, VizWiz lets users to record a question or a problem verbally and submit the audio clips as instructions to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, where agents play such clips. Therefore, by using crowdsourcing, interface developers are able to produce pworeful tools at considerably reduced budgets and within a much shorter period than would be possible in traditional interface development. Challenges in crowd sourcing Despite its main benefits and uses, crowdsourcing has emerged to have major challenges that have to be dealt with in realizing its full benefits. One of the greatest challenges in crowdsourcing is the need to go through hundreds of thousands of ideas in identifying the best and most appropriate design to be implemented, or the best idea to solve a problem (Tee, Leiponen & Aitamurto, 2011). In most cases, though there are thousands of members in crowdsourcing communities, most of them do not post useful ideas, but offer inferior suggestions, or critiques to designs and suggestions of other members without providing the best solution to make such ideas perfect. The result is that one has to undertake a painful evaluation of hundreds or thousands of such ideas before settling on the best one that may be considered in offering an innovative solution. This problem has manifested itself in companies such as Nokia and Dell, where thousands of such members’ comments are of no value or have increased ambiguity, making them difficult or inferior to implement (Tee, Leiponen & Aitamurto, 2011). The companies have to take much time in finding the best solution according to the details provided and the innovativeness of a particular idea. In addition, another major challenge in crowdsourcing is collaboration versus competition in formulating the best innovative idea to solve a problem. As Terras (2012) asserts, crowdsourcing has to be a collaborative affair where an online community breaks down a complex task to numerous single simple tasks that have to be acted upon differently in making the whole. On the other hand, most people have the ‘heroes’ attitude in crowdsourcing and would like to have their ideas dominate others in the contribution. In other words, some members do not take time to contribute in the group work approach through collaboration in formulating a valid solution. Some prefer individual tasks, resulting in weaker solutions that may not be of value to a company. Rowe (2008) explains that this defeats the very sense of crowdsourcing, where less technical people offer solutions to complex problems. For instance, the rewards offered by companies in Inno Centive do not encourage collaborative approach to problem solution, but individualistic approaches, which lead to numerous proposals of low value, which may not be viable in implementing. Having the best idea instead of collaborating blurs the essence of crowdsourcing. Most crowdsourcing projects lead to major creative injustices where the winner takes it all, while other participants that have invested in time, resources and intellect are left with nothing despite their major efforts towards the solution. As discussed companies such as Proctor and Gamble have found a better solution in Inno Centive, a platform that offers much better solutions to issues that the companies could otherwise not have dealt with in their in house research departments (Tee, Leiponen & Aitamurto, 2011). Consequently, to encourage and thank such people, these companies offer handsome packs that may range from hundreds of thousands of dollars for the winning solution. Though such an offer interests a huge number of participants in the crowdsourcing community at Inno Centive, only one or a few winners gets the reward and, while the rest though had invested heavily in the process end up with nothing. This is not only discouraging, but also a major form of injustice that has to be addressed in the crowdsourcing process. How to generate interest in a design project The best way to generate high interest in a software design project online is by using a prominent crowdsourcing company such as Top Coder. The company deals in software development through the broadcast principle in developing components and software. The company has over 260,000 programmers working on a freelance basis spread working in over 200 countries. The developers have to compete in developing the best software that meets high quality standards (Fried, 2010). By placing the request to have the software development, there will be a good degree of interests in the project and considering that the company utilizes talents spread across the globe, the chances of obtaining a high quality developer to handle the project would be very high. The advantage would be getting such quality at much lower costs compared to other crowd sourcing services. On the average, due to the intense competition across the globe, and the competition-based software design approach, it is possible to have high quality software at between 30% to 60% reduced costs (Fried, 2010). Through such process, it would be much easier for the project to be handled through crowdsourcing compared to cases where individual developers may take months to come up with such software. On the other hand, due to competitive-based software design process in Top Coder, it would be possible to find the best price for quality service considering that on average Top Coder. Evaluating the skills of developers Considering that, software has to be developed by people whose skills are not known, there is need to put in place measures to evaluate the skills of those interested in the project. There is need to also avoid creativity injustice where many may develop the software, which fail to meet the specification required (Tee, Leiponen & Aitamurto, 2011). In order to prevent this injustice and in getting the right person to develop the software, the interested parties have to be asked to write down some short codes and then explain in detail how they would progress to meet the criteria required in developing the complete software before the best developer is settled on. This will also make it easy to evaluate the high number of interested responses compared to going through the entire codes of complete software from a number of developers. Handling such a task would be much easier for developers and would not consume much of their time compared to developing complete software. Consequently, the project will have many interested parties handing in their proposals without worrying about their software being ejected after committing a lot of resources and time in the process. Ethical, social, and legal implications of crowdsourcing There are wide ranging debates related to the social, legal or ethical concerns of crowdsourcing in the society today. For instance, most university-based students in IT before completing their studies have to undertake software and other code based developments. However, instead of personally undertaking such tasks, most have used competitive based crowdsourcing services to outsource their projects, which they present as their own projects (Harris, 2011). This creates an unethical situation in education and is a challenge that has continually developed with ease of access to crowdsourcing companies. There is a social and legal concern in the extent that anonymity involved on the internet platform facilitates behaviors that would not likely be possible in face-to-face contacts, which has fuelled debates in e-ethics (Harris, 2011). This is because there are numerous chances of finding someone to do unethical work in such crowdsourcing groups emboldened by the pseudo-anonymity provided by internet connections. Some companies in crowdsourcing also continue to gather information unethically mostly in unethical projects. This may also entail cracking into people’s emails or company’s websites at a fee (Harris, 2011). On the other hand, in some cases the person undertaking the task may not realize the project is unethical, as it has to be divided into several small components to be handed by different individuals. Moreover, crowdsourcing is responsible for making it possible for companies to solicit user reviews especially where such reviews are instrumental in getting clients. An example is the companies that appear in TripAdvisior, which has over 50 million visitors each year looking for reviews about the best areas to visit before planning a trip. The result is that some companies outsource reviews in crowdsourcing companies where such companies obtain thousands of reviews placing them on top of the rest though the reviews are mostly falsified (Harris, 2011). Therefore, outsourcing has led to numerous social, ethical and legal dilemmas in the market today. Crowdsourcing refers to splitting of tasks into numerous small tasks that have to be handled individually in minutes or seconds. This helps even non-technical persons to complete complex tasks. The main advantage is that crowdsourcing involves tapping talents and skills from across the globe where a company has to access the best innovations and talents at much lower costs and at much less time. Consequently, this process is predominantly used in software development in addition to development of other products. Despite these benefits, there are challenges in creative content injustices, the need for a company to review millions of posts. Moreover, there are numerous ethical and legal challenges associated with crowdsourcing. All the same, there are major benefits for a company to be involved today with companies such as Dell and Microsoft having invested largely in crowdsourcing leading to innovative products. References Aitamurto, T., Leiponen, A & Tee, R. (2011). The Promise of Idea Crowdsourcing Benefits, Contexts, Limitations. White Paper. 1-30 Brabham, D.C. (2008). Crowdsourcing as a Model for Problem Solving. The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies. 14(1): 75–90. DOI: 10.1177/1354856507084420 Fried, D. (2010). Crowdsourcing in the Software Development Industry. Retrieved from https://next.eller.arizona.edu/courses/outsourcing/Fall2010/student_papers/final_papers/Fried,%20Daniel%20-%20Crowdsourcing%20in%20the%20Software%20Development%20Industry.pdf Gutheim, P & Hartmann, B. (2012). Fantasktic: Improving Quality of Results for Novice Crowdsourcing Users. Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences. Retrieved from http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2012/EECS-2012-112.pdf Harris, G.C. (2011). Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap: A Darker Side to Crowdsourcing. 2011 IEEE International Conference on Social Computing, 1314-1317. DOI: 978-0-7695-4578-3/11 Howe, J. (2008).Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business. Retrieved from http://www.bizbriefings.com/Samples/IntInst%20---%20Crowdsourcing.PDF Mau, B. (2004) Massive Change. New York: Phaidon Oomen, J., & Aroyo, L. (2011). Crowdsourcing in the cultural heritage domain: opportunities and challenges. In C&T ’11 Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Communities and Technologies. pp138–149. doi:10.1145/2103354.2103373 Terras, M. (2012). Present, Not Voting: Digital Humanities in the Panopticon. In D. Berry (Ed.), Understanding Digital Humanities (pp. 172–190). Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan Read More