Abstract
Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is an online service that connects people all over the world who are willing to work for monetary compensation with companies and individuals who need simple tasks completed that are best done by humans. This paper examines the benefits and caveats from the use of Mechanical Turk as a platform to conduct an online usability test. Our findings indicate that Mechanical Turk can be a very useful tool when it is employed to collect basic user generated data such as click time and location, text input, and subjective usability data. In situations where more complex usage data is required, Mechanical Turk can still be a valuable resource to run a pilot test to assist in determining potential usability problems. However, in its current form, Mechanical Turk has limitations and can only be used to assess websites; it cannot be relied upon to conduct a usability test on software without the use of a virtual machine.
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