Crowdsourcing Project – Summary of Key Learnings


By Jan Dittrich, João Menezes, Ryan Bubinski, Zach Williams

Key Learnings – Status Quo and Gaps

Team 1 sent out a questionnaire form to all those who had participated in any Mozilla Labs Design Challenges. Thirty-seven past participants answered – thanks to all of them for supporting us!

Many of the participants had either a design (14) or Computer Science (10) academic background. In analyzing our outreach we had some interesting findings: The majority of participants found out about the Challenges through the Mozilla Labs website, others found out through blogs, news websites, or through their university. Though Twitter is supposed to be a popular and widely used service among designers or programmers, only 3 got to know about the challenge via twitter!

The majority of participants valued video as an efficient medium of explaining the Design Challenge brief, and almost everybody was satisfied with the information they found on the Mozilla Labs website concerning the Challenge.

93% felt they received good support from Mozilla. When asked about the evaluation of the submitted designs, 73% found the evaluation to be transparent and fair. Those who felt otherwise noted an inconsistency in judges providing feedback, while others expressed concerns on the voting system for submitted designs being gamed by participants recruiting friends to vote for particular submissions.

Since work in UX covers a lot of different topics we were interested if people worked in teams – less than a third did so which means that those who did the work alone are the majority but teamwork is nevertheless a common way of work that needs to be considered in our concepts.

As it would be great if people would carry on with their involvement in mozilla projects, we asked if they carried on with their work on the designs after the callenge. One third did this in one or the other way. Some tried to implement an extension while others said that the ideas they developed were integrated in other designs later.

When asked whether they would be interested in participating in future Design Challenges, 89% responded positively, and 84% responded they would recommend participation to their friends or colleagues.

The last point to talk about is a very important one: What were the motivations of the participants?
The most common answer (several could be given) was “furthering personal knowledge” (87%), followed by “Recognition” (56%). Analysing coherences in our data we found out that Resume-Building was more common among design students than among the ones with other academic backgrounds.