The motivations and experiences of the on-demand mobile workforce

Teodoro, Rannie; Öztürk, Pınar; Нааман, Мор; Mason, Winter; Lindqvist, Janne

doi:10.1145/2531602.2531680

Cited by 78 publications

(76 citation statements)

References 29 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Indeed, the strong motivational force of perceived control, flexibility, and autonomy in the workplace has also been documented in emerging forms of work organization, such as in the gig economy [72]. At the same time, it was clear from our findings that there was a considerable amount of unaccounted work that occurred in negotiating this flexibility.…”

Section: Flexibility Accountability and Intensification Of Worksupporting

confidence: 65%

“…Yet, as noted by Moore [53], despite the long-contested use of digital technology to monitor worker performance and productivity, quantification and algorithmic or data-driven work appear to be on the rise. Perhaps most prominently, these trends appear to clearly materialize in the case of ondemand workforces [40,51,72] emerging within the rapidly evolving landscape of 'gig' or platform economy [37].…”

Section: Related Work Workplace Monitoring and Performance Managementmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Everything We Do, Everything We Press

Bakewell

Vasileiou

Long

et al. 2018

Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper examines how data-driven performance monitoring technologies affect the work of telecommunications field engineers. As a mobile workforce, this occupational group rely on an array of smartphone applications to plan, manage and report on their jobs, and to liaise remotely with managers and colleagues. These technologies intend to help field engineers be more productive and have greater control over their work; however they also gather data related to the quantity and effectiveness of their labor. We conducted a qualitative study examining engineers' experiences of these systems. Our findings suggest they simultaneously enhance worker autonomy, support co-ordination with and monitoring of colleagues, but promote anxieties around productivity and the interpretation of data by management. We discuss the implications of datadriven performance management technologies on worker agency, and examine the consequences of such systems in an era of quantified workplaces.

show abstract

Section: Flexibility Accountability and Intensification Of Worksupporting

confidence: 65%

Section: Related Work Workplace Monitoring and Performance Managementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Everything We Do, Everything We Press

Bakewell

Vasileiou

Long

et al. 2018

Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…To better understand the influence of work environments on crowdsourced microtasks, we conducted 7 semistructured interviews with CrowdFlower workers [65] who completed all tasks in the batches described earlier in Study II.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Modus Operandi of Crowd Workers

Gadiraju

Checco

Gupta

et al. 2017

Proc. ACM Interact. Mob. Wearable Ubiquitous Technol.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The ubiquity of the Internet and the widespread proliferation of electronic devices has resulted in flourishing microtask crowdsourcing marketplaces, such as Amazon MTurk. An aspect that has remained largely invisible in microtask crowdsourcing is that of work environments; defined as the hardware and software affordances at the disposal of crowd workers which are used to complete microtasks on crowdsourcing platforms. In this paper, we reveal the significant role of work environments in the shaping of crowd work. First, through a pilot study surveying the good and bad experiences workers had with UI elements in crowd work, we revealed the typical issues workers face. Based on these findings, we then deployed over 100 distinct microtasks on CrowdFlower, addressing workers in India and USA in two identical batches. These tasks emulate the good and bad UI element designs that characterize crowdsourcing microtasks. We recorded hardware specifics such as CPU speed and device type, apart from software specifics including the browsers used to complete tasks, operating systems on the device, and other properties that define the work environments of crowd workers. Our findings indicate that crowd workers are embedded in a variety of work environments which influence the quality of work produced. To confirm and validate our data-driven findings we then carried out semi-structured interviews with a sample of Indian and American crowd workers from this platform. Depending on the design of UI elements in microtasks, we found that some work environments support crowd workers more than others. Based on our overall findings resulting from all the three studies, we introduce ModOp, a tool that helps to design crowdsourcing microtasks that are suitable for diverse crowd work environments. We empirically show that the use of ModOp results in reducing the cognitive load of workers, thereby improving their user experience without effecting the accuracy or task completion time.

show abstract

“…Notable mobile marketplace platforms include GigWalk [15], TaskRabbit [21], and FieldAgent [1]. Following the rise of these platforms, recent research has examined the practices and dynamics of mobile marketplaces [32,41,42]. On one hand, these platforms provide relatively easy access to on-demand workforce (both online and mobile), however it is difficult to recruit crowdworkers using these platforms for a sustained period of time.…”

Section: Mobile Crowdsourcing Platformsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The night is young

Santani

Biel

Labhart

et al. 2016

Proceedings of the 2016 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

We present a mobile crowdsourcing study to capture and examine the nightlife patterns of two youth populations in Switzerland. Our contributions are three fold. First, we developed a smartphone application to capture data on places, social context and nightlife activities, and to record mobile videos capturing the ambiance of places. Second, we conducted an "in-the-wild" study with more than 200 participants over a period of three months in two Swiss cities, resulting in a total of 1,394 unique place visits and 843 videos that spread across place categories (including personal homes and public parks), social and ambiance variables. Finally, we investigated the use of automatic ambiance features to estimate the loudness and brightness of places at scale, and found that while features are reliable with respect to video content, videos do not always reflect the place ambiance reported by people in-situ. We believe that the developed methodology provides an opportunity to understand the physical mobility, activities, and social context of youth as they experience different aspects of nightlife.

show abstract

The motivations and experiences of the on-demand mobile workforce

Cited by 78 publications

References 29 publications

Everything We Do, Everything We Press

Everything We Do, Everything We Press

Modus Operandi of Crowd Workers

The night is young

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About