Over the past decade, there has been a rise in the number of people working on crowdsourcing platforms. Although those who work on crowdworking platforms (i.e., crowdworkers) value having autonomy over scheduling their own time, research suggests that they do not benefit from the temporal flexibility to choose when and for how long to work. Therefore, in this project, we aim to understand what limits the temporal flexibility of crowdworkers, and how this aspect impacts the workers. Our ultimate goal is to inform the design of future crowdsourcing platforms.
We employ Value Sensitive Design (VSD) as our theory and design framework. Using the lens of VSD and a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, we show that crowdworkers’ temporal flexibility is limited by three different types of time constraints: (i) worker-imposed time constraints, (ii) client-imposed time constraints, and (iii) platform-imposed time constraints. These time constraints limit: (a) the temporal working preferences of workers, (b) the time workers have to make decisions, and (c) the work pace and work schedules of workers. Ultimately, we confirm that the existing features of crowdsourcing platforms do not fully support flexible temporal arrangements for workers; instead, these platforms favour clients’ flexibility to workers’ detriment.
People
This project was conducted by Dr Laura Lascau under the supervision of Prof Anna Cox, Prof Duncan Brumby and Dr Sandy Gould.
Publications
Lascău, L., Brumby, D. P., Gould, S. J., & Cox, A. L. (2024). “Sometimes It’s Like Putting the Track in Front of the Rushing Train”: Having to Be ‘On Call’for Work Limits the Temporal Flexibility of Crowdworkers. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 31(2), 1-45.
Lascau, L. (2023). Time as currency: a value sensitive design exploration of crowdworkers’ temporal flexibility (Doctoral dissertation, UCL (University College London)).
Lascau, L., Gould, S. J., Brumby, D. P., & Cox, A. L. (2022, April). Crowdworkers’ temporal flexibility is being traded for the convenience of requesters through 19 ‘invisible mechanisms’ employed by crowdworking platforms: A comparative analysis study of nine platforms. In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Extended Abstracts (pp. 1-8).
Lascau, L., Gould, S. J., Cox, A. L., Karmannaya, E., & Brumby, D. P. (2019, May). Monotasking or multitasking: Designing for crowdworkers’ preferences. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 1-14).
