Personalized Task Recommendation in the Field

This chapter evaluates the potential of the developed prototype to realize and study personalized task recommendation on existing crowdsourcing platforms and thereby improve the match between contributors and available tasks. To this intent, the following sections present a sequence of three studies that were conducted along the process of field testing and deploying the metacrowd service on the Mechanical Turk platform. Section 5.1 first describes a pilot study that gathered initial feedback from a small group of experienced contributors. Section 5.2 then lays out the details of a large-scale survey on general task search behavior and on the perceived utility of the metacrowd service. Section 5.3, finally, analyzes a dataset that was gathered during an extended period of productive use and discusses the challenges identified during the evaluation.