The Power of the Crowd: A Game Changer for Marketing and User Experience Design

Let’s take a look at 3 use cases

The global data-labeling market is growing by the hour, with some sources estimating the figures to exceed 8 billion USD by 2028. Crowdsourcing, a labeling method known for its time- and cost-effectiveness, is beginning to claim an ever larger portion of this market. The applications range from supporting ML algorithms in e-commerce and AV to marine engineering. One of the latest fields to be impacted is marketing and user experience design (UXD). Let’s look at 3 use cases to see how exactly the power of the crowd is being utilized there:

(1) Ask the Crowd, UX tool powered by Toloka

User experience (UX) is all about making sure that your product’s end user has a pleasant time interacting with your product’s interface. As a user, it comes down to being able to get to where you want to get — either on the web or in an app — quickly and efficiently.

The problem is that after hours upon hours of coding and tweaking, most product developers and interface designers may lose touch with how someone from the outside sees and interacts with their creation. In other words, what seems apparent to the product’s maker is often not at all apparent to the product’s first-time user. Thanks to Ask the Crowd now there is a simple and elegant solution of addressing the crowd to learn what they think. In a way, this is similar to product test-driving, except that with test-driving you actually need to find test users somewhere, which isn’t always possible for a new company. Another downside is that you may not always want to reveal an unfinished product to the public, even if it’s a beta release. And, of course, you need the right templates.

Ask the Crowd offers a viable way out — its UX service powered by Toloka is available in multiple languages 24/7, and the results are normally ready in a matter of minutes. As a product developer or UX designer, you can conduct an instant usability survey involving either multiple choice or open-ended questions to help you determine how to offer the best user experience to both future and existing clients.

(2) HTML/JS-based UX testing for online banking

Often, developers and designers interested in UXD want to take it up a notch — rather than just asking the crowd open- or closed-ended questions, they may wish to observe how the users actually respond to and interact with the interface in real time.

Toloka offers this more advanced route, too, which entails using the platform’s existing image classification templates (for example, side by side), as well as incorporating any number of external clickable templates using HTML and JS (for example, First click, Five seconds, etc). These templates can be further supported by data visualization techniques like heat maps from Yandex.Metrica and Google Analytics to get to the bottom of what the user is trying to do when using your product.

Module Bank, a bank specializing in servicing small to medium-sized businesses, went for this solution with Toloka. The bank was working on the newest interface design for its app, and the developers couldn’t agree on the position and color of the app’s icons. Some thought that all of the icons should be the same color but their positioning on the screen should change. The others thought that different colors should be used for different icons in order for their individual functions to stand out but their positioning on the screen should remain fixed. Both groups argued that doing otherwise would confuse the user.

With Toloka’s help, the team from Module Bank conducted an HTML/JS-based multi-stage usability study. The conclusion was that most users find icons that look different but located in the same places of the interface more intuitive and easier to adapt to than icons that look the same but are located in different places of the interface. In other words, from the user’s perspective, icon location is more important than icon appearance. The team was able to confirm a hypothesis originally proposed by UIE and acted to alter their app’s interface based on these findings.

The screenshots below illustrate the difference between the two UXD options:

A

B

(3) Branding and rebranding

Both branding and rebranding are a crucial marketing step that gives the company (or their product) an identity. It is through this identity, that the company is able to convey certain values and messages to the public in order to build a relationship with its customers and maintain a competitive edge. In today’s commerce, a lot of it is purely visual; after all, a picture is worth a thousand words. As a result, it’s important to know how your potential customers perceive your brand before you decide to lock in your corporate design and use it to conduct business.

Toloka offers a crowd-based solution to help companies, both old and new, work out the most suitable visual features that accurately reflect what the company stands for. One of the first companies to try this approach was Toloka itself that went through major rebranding last year. Since its launch in 2014, the company had evolved a great deal and felt that it needed to have these changes reflected in their renewed brand identity. Toloka utilized the power of its own crowd and managed to:

• Identify specific brand attributes
• Choose the most fitting corporate color scheme
• Choose the most appropriate fractal design
• Come up with a new logo

The Q&A methodology here was similar to UX testing from the previous two cases — the difference is that it wasn’t about usability but about associations, impressions, and willingness to put your trust in the company, which is something that can make or break a business.

The takeaway

Whatever marketing or UX improvements you need to make, crowdsourcing offers a viable strategy to help you see quickly what needs to be changed, why, and often how. Above all, this track can help you determine whether anything you already have in mind is resonating with your current and future customers both in terms of your brand’s message and the usability of your product’s interface.

What used to take vast resources and months of market research, today can be done online in a matter of days, hours, and sometimes even minutes. Toloka has a number of supervised and unsupervised solutions available to support your marketing and UXD needs, both fully customizable and ready-to-go.