CrowdUI: Supporting Web Design with the Crowd

Abstract

Web design is a complex and challenging task. It involves making many design decisions that materialise preconceived notions of user needs that may or may not be true. In this paper, we investigate supporting the co-design of a website with visual feedback elicited from the website's community of users. Website users can express their needs by rearranging and modifying the website's layout and design. To explore and validate this idea, we present CrowdUI, a web-based tool that enables members of the community of a website to visually express their design improvement ideas, frustrations and needs, and to send this feedback to the person in charge of designing or maintaining the website. CrowdUI is validated in a study with 45 users of a popular social media and networking website. Second, our qualitative evaluation with 60 experienced web developers shows that CrowdUI is able to elicit diverse and meaningful feedback. Put together, our results suggest that CrowdUI's approach constitutes a productive setting for eliciting visual feedback from the user community as a complement to traditional ways of eliciting feedback and participatory design. Finally, based on our experiences, we discuss a design space for crowdsourced web design and provide design recommendations for similar future tools. CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → Human computer interaction (HCI); User studies; User interface toolkits; • Information systems → Crowdsourcing.

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

“…Another consideration is how feedback should be collected and provided to students. As is evident in a number of crowd feedback systems (e.g., [29,41,43]), visualization and aggregation of feedback supports the feedback receiver in making sense of the feedback. Research on mechanisms for aggregating crowdsourced design feedback is only recently emerging (e.g., [43]).…”

“…The system aims to capture the first impressions and how well a graphic design meets its stated goals and design guidelines. CrowdUI [29] is a system for eliciting and aggregating visual feedback on the design of a website. The system enables users to modify a website's user interface.…”

Collaborative Model-Driven Software Engineering — A systematic survey of practices and needs in industry

“…However, we also observe that these three features are being studied by a fair number of approaches. For example, the management of complex MVM scenarios has been studied in Gómez et al (2020) and Tendeloo and Vangheluwe (2018), model validation via OCL constraints in Zhu et al (2007) and via a critics-based approach in Wieland et al (2013), and web-based environments in WebGME (Maróti et al, 2014a) and CrowdUI (Oppenlaender et al, 2020). On the left-hand side of the top half, we observe that textual editors (10 of 72 -14%) and tabular editors (7 of 72 -10%) received less attention by researchers on collaborative MDSE, even though they tend to be more needed by the participants of our survey.…”

Spacewalker: Rapid UI Design Exploration Using Lightweight Markup Enhancement and Crowd Genetic Programming

“…The crowd can be more actively involved in UI design tasks to provide feedback [14,17,25,26] or participate in the design process [10,11,15]. Apparition supports creating UI designs and animations from interface sketches and natural language descriptions through self-coordinated real-time crowdsourcing [9].…”