with exercises for platform designers
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overview
Type:
M1.2 Design Project
challenge:
How to make the heuristics usable for designers
concept:
A toolkit containing heuristics cards and exercises to be used in brainstorm-sessions and workshops.
competencies:
client:
Design2Gather, Crowd.site
Explanation
Crowdsourcing is growing in both industry and academia, giving us new understanding of how to work using the power of the crowd. Crowdsourcing platforms are looking for ways to improve, by making the platform more sustainable and increase member’s participation. Our previous research has determined a set of community heuristics (guidelines) to evaluate these platforms. However, how could one design a new platform using these heuristics?
The community toolkit contains relevant exercises for designers, to envision new opportunities in the design of their platform. Using the community heuristics cards for crowdsourcing platforms, one can brainstorm using the materials in the toolkit. Let’s make the crowd a community!
Besides the toolkit, wireframes were designed for a dashboard for crowdsourcing platforms owners to see how well their community was doing. A Invision prototype was created to show this concept.
Reflection
Key learning points: Data analysing, academic writing
Although the outcome of the semester is a toolkit, most of the semester was spent on analyzing the data of 4 evaluators who each evaluated 5 platforms based on the heuristics. There were over 200 data points containing a score, a written piece and a screenshot which had to be formed into meaningful output. Using Excel compared this data in all kind of different way in order to find interesting results for the paper. The work was written down in version 2 of the paper and was submitted to the ECSCW journal. The key learning point was in writing down this work down in an academic way. Especially by the collaboration with Javed who taught me how to look with the eyes of a reviewer. Having the evaluators using the forms allowed us to understand better what designers thought of the process. I found out this was quite a tedious job spending multiple hours per platform. Therefore I created the toolkit and exercises which are now used to give training in the form of Acamponie.