Mobilizing Crowdwork: A Systematic Assessment of the Mobile Usability of HITs

There is a growing interest in extending crowdwork beyond traditional desktop-centric design to include mobile devices (e.g., smartphones). However, mobilizing crowdwork remains significantly tedious due to a lack of understanding about the mobile usability requirements of human intelligence tasks (HITs). We present a taxonomy of characteristics that defines the mobile usability of HITs for smartphone devices. The taxonomy is developed based on findings from a study of three consecutive steps. In Step 1, we establish an initial design of our taxonomy through a targeted literature analysis. In Step 2, we verify and extend the taxonomy through an online survey with Amazon Mechanical Turk crowdworkers. Finally, in Step 3 we demonstrate the taxonomy’s utility by applying it to analyze the mobile usability of a dataset of scraped HITs. In this paper, we present the iterative development of the taxonomy, highlighting the observed practices and preferences around mobile crowdwork. We conclude with the implications of our taxonomy for accessibly and ethically mobilizing crowdwork not only within the context of smartphone devices, but beyond them.