Hardhats and Bungaloos: Comparing Crowdsourced Design Feedback with Peer Design Feedback in the Classroom

TL;DR

This study compares crowdsourced and peer design feedback in a classroom, finding students view crowdsourced feedback as inferior but also recognize unique benefits, informing future educational practices.

Contribution

It provides an empirical comparison of crowdsourced versus peer feedback in design education, highlighting strengths and limitations of crowdsourcing in this context.

Findings

Students perceive peer feedback as higher quality and fairer.

Crowdsourced feedback offers unique positive aspects not found in peer feedback.

Students value the monetary aspect of crowdsourced feedback.

Abstract

Feedback is an important aspect of design education, and crowdsourcing has emerged as a convenient way to obtain feedback at scale. In this paper, we investigate how crowdsourced design feedback compares to peer design feedback within a design-oriented HCI class and across two metrics: perceived quality and perceived fairness. We also examine the perceived monetary value of crowdsourced feedback, which provides an interesting contrast to the typical requester-centric view of the value of labor on crowdsourcing platforms. Our results reveal that the students (N=106) perceived the crowdsourced design feedback as inferior to peer design feedback in multiple ways. However, they also identified various positive aspects of the online crowds that peers cannot provide. We discuss the meaning of the findings and provide suggestions for teachers in HCI and other researchers interested in crowd feedback systems on using crowds as a potential complement to peers.