In my previous post in this series I talked about refining your question to be as clear as possible. Good questions will directly impact the accuracy of your results. Now I want to talk about how you impact velocity -- that is how quickly do Workers do your HITs?
I recently was working with a Requester who was asking Workers to call a phone number and verify the name of the business. This is a fairly common use case especially among local search and flash sales companies. The Requester included the phone number as a text string in their first group of HITs. A Worker emailed and suggested he include a link that would automatically dial the phone (for those Workers using Skype or an IP phone service like Vonage).
This simple change cost the Requester nothing (ok maybe 2 minutes of coding time). But it had a BIG impact on Worker efficiency. The “effective hourly rate” of his HITs increased by 15%. He paid Workers better without paying more per HIT. And the second group of HITs was completed faster than the first group. This change also eliminates dialing error for the Workers who use the link to dial.
I encourage you to look at your HITs (or better yet do 100 of them) and identify ways you can reduce work time. For instance if your HIT includes a search, include a link to a Web Search results page with the search terms. Also try to eliminate scrolling by placing the buttons or input fields next to the data the Worker needs to complete these fields.
-- Sharon
P.S. For those of you interested in the html code to include a telephone number link, here it is:
<p><a href="callto:+1${PHONE}"> PHONE NUMBER</a></p>
Note that you will need to include a column labeled “PHONE” in the CSV you upload via the Requester website. And the phone numbers in that column need to be just the digits (no dashes or parenthesis). If you need to eliminate these non-digit characters, you can use the Microsoft Excel function called “REPLACE” to do this prior to uploading your file.
