Intelligent Mobile Crowd Design Platform

We propose CrowdDesign: a novel crowdsourcing-based design/evaluation platform that allows evolving design concepts with heterogeneous user groups, provides context-aware analytics and leverages end-users' creativity. A central notion in CrowdDesign is a designlet-a specific user interface design, such as a prototype of a heating control interface or a smart remote control, coupled with a simple user task (such as setting the desired temperature or choosing a channel). To ease the development of designlets, CrowdDesign will be built on top of Google Android's existing development frameworks and extend their high-level and flexible design environment in order to minimise coding efforts. A designer submits a designlet via the CrowdDesign platform, which then distributes it to thousands of volunteers who are using the CrowdDesign mobile app. This app then weaves designlets into an engaging workflow in the app, which will be designed to entice, engage and retain volunteers using a variety of social features and gamification elements. Usage data from participants tackling the prescribed task in the designlet is then provided to the designer via a web-based analytics platform. Contextual data gathered via on-board mobile device sensors will be provided to the designer in order to understand broad interaction contexts, such as whether a participant was standing still or walking when engaging with their design. CrowdDesign relies on intrinsic motivation to entice, engage and retain users. The fundamental problem this proposal is tackling is the difficulty of evaluating user interface designs in realistic use contexts with large representative groups of users. This is critical in order for designers to fully emphasise with end-users. Unfortunately it is also time-consuming and expensive to recruit participants for lab studies and such studies often fail to capture important design implications. CrowdDesign makes it easier for designers to perform rapid in-situ evaluations of new user interface designs based on primarily three observations: 1) a large subset of current user interfaces can be accurately modelled by commodity smartphones and tablets. For instance, such user interfaces are commonly used in a) mobile apps, b) interfaces for users with motor disabilities and c) home appliance interfaces, such as heating controls; 2) mature sensor frameworks enable us to automatically sense the context of use, which further helps designers emphasise with end-users; and 3) prior research has convincingly demonstrated it is possible to crowd source tasks to tens of thousand of users by relying on users' intrinsic motivations. However, prior research has not established the feasibility of interleaving a crowdsourcing platform with a user interface design process and has not attempted to make participants of the platform first-class citizens.