There have been many success stories
with the wonders of crowdsourcing. However, there bound to be come failures
alongside the success stories. It’s important that we learn what causes these
instances of crowdsourcing to fail and what can we do to fix them to ensure
better success in our ventures.
The first primary reason why
crowdsourcing can fail is that the crowd
does not reflect typical users. When a person is creating an application or
a website through crowdsourcing, more often than not, they will ask help from
the general populace on how to make said site. The problem arises when site or
application in question is designed for a particular demographic or niche. The
general populace, consisting of people with multiple backgrounds, are not
particularly reliable in reflecting what the designed demographic needs. For
example, a crowdsourced application that is designed with the 18-25 demographic
in mind, will not get the best results of if crowdsourcing it reached out to
the broad populace. We fix this by finding out who our application is for and
tailoring that app to that demographic rather trying to reach out to the
broadest populace and hoping for the best.
The second primary reason why
crowdsourcing can fail is that people
don’t always do what they say they do. In focus group research, people have
tendency to say what they think they want the company wants to hear rather than
say what they actually do. It’s problems like these that led to such failures
like the Ford Edsel. Ford wanted asked for opinions on what people wanted from
a car and got exactly that, opinions. Opinions are only useful if they can be
validated through testing.
The final primary reason why
crowdsourcing can fail is that asking a
biased question can get you biased answer. When asking a question, how that
question is asked can impact the viable results of a crowdsourcing project. By
just changing one or two words, the question can end up greatly skewing the
results needed for a crowdsourcing application and may not be results the
company will desire. When evaluating crowdsourced usability, usually the
questions asked will be the reason why the results are what they are.
Therefore, to ensure greater usability, we must be careful in the wording of
our questions to the crowd in order to achieve desired usability and results.
By: Henry Hancock
This is a great post that has the important keys for successful crowdsourcing projects. Primarily, a crowdsourcing project fails when it does not have enough crowd supporting it. SImply, to get the most out of your crowd, you need to target individuals' needs and desires. That also requires you to keep them motivated and satisfied with your services, products, and attention.
ReplyDeleteGreat pointers. I hate when people explain and do the entire opposite things. Lot of these projects are not transparent and often does communicate. It is obvious that such projects often fails.
ReplyDelete