8 Best Crowdsourcing Websites for Apps & Games
By: Taufik R
Tags: Crowdfunding, Game Development, Business, Fundraising, Startup

Even though crowdsourcing is a centuries-old concept, it is only recently that it has become accessible to smaller, younger innovators. How can this concept of complete strangers testing your application help you?

Crowdsourcing in IT has multiple uses. Collecting mass data, usability testing and research are just a few of those examples.

Conventionally these tasks were done by hiring a large improvised workforce which used to be expensive, time-consuming and very difficult to scale. Crowdsourcing helps tackle all these issues and provides benefits like optimized efficiency, increased flexibility, and reduced cost.

Here, I have listed the top 8 crowdsourcing websites that you can use to perfect your system.

Usability testing has indeed become one of the most important key steps in the Software Testing procedure. It helps to determine the extent to which your software product is easy to use, learn and understand.

However, bad news for all the UI/UX experts, usability testing is not an easy job to perform. This is where uTest comes to your assistance. One of the most important key features of uTest is that allows you to perform usability testing online.

uTest has “18,000 QA professionals from 150 countries”, making it one of the best platforms to test your software.

The testing is carried out by well-experienced developers who not only perform usability testing on your software products but also give you detailed usability feedback and perform research for you if required.

In 2015, with an increasing number of testers around 400,000, uTest rebranded as “Applause App. Quality, Inc.” with an updated crowdsourcing site connecting the software testers all over the world. Facebook, Google, Fox Broadcasting, eBay, Concur and Runkeeper are some of the many influential customers of uTest.

Hence, if you are looking for a platform to get your mobile application or game product tested, uTest is the ideal place to look for help!

Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is a crowdsourcing marketplace that outsources certain processes and jobs to a widespread workforce, for both individuals and businesses.

With 500,000+ users, MTurk is perhaps the most famous, most diverse and most trusted tool in the realm of crowdsourcing.

This site allows new startups or businesses to acquire insight and skills from a workforce that is global. It allows them to augment data collection and streamline business activities. Moreover, MTurk also aids to speed up machine learning development.

MTurk is very famous in the field of HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) because of its global nature. From gaming to UI testing, this website offers every sort of service that you can possibly think of.

MTurk should be your go-to crowdsourcing website if you want to conduct accessibility testing of your application, or if you want to find the effectiveness of your e-learning games.

Relatively new in the market, the Crowdsourcer.io is such a platform that is equally beneficial for the employers and freelancers alike.

It works on the principle of profit-sharing. Let’s make you understand with a simple example.

Suppose you are a team-lead whose job is to develop an application or a game. Before getting down to business, your job is to develop your own team, assign milestones to every developer and then get started.

Remember, you are in need of top-talent and you have access to several online platforms where you can simply post a job. Within a matter of a few seconds, your email will be flooded with dozens of resumes and from here, a tiring process of hiring the best coder starts.

The CrowdSourcer.io works smartly. It allows a team-lead to create a project and upload all the necessary files related to that project on the platform. Once it’s done, the team-lead is asked to specify the number of contributors that are needed on board. The freelancer out there who are searching for a project to work on will simply check out the attached files and once he is absolutely sure that his contribution will be worthwhile, will simply contact the team-lead and will become a part of the team.

Crowdsourcer.io has bridged the gap between the talent and the opportunities and is proving to be a great crowdsourcing tool across the globe.

Now a well-established name in crowdsourcing, with 1+ million users, MicroWorkers is a direct competitor of MTurk. Predominantly US and UK-based, Microworks provide versatile services to its users, from Data Mining to surveys, this website has it all.

Even though the interface is not the best looking, this is probably the quickest and easiest website to get started on. Within 48 hours of making an account and paying for a task, your request goes live.

Posting a project or “campaign” on Microworkers is similar to posting a gig on Fiverr. You put a title, instructions, and number of minutes that your workers need to spend on your campaign, and you are good to go. Do note that all campaigns are submitted for a review before becoming live.

Not everything is gold here though. Unlike MTurk and other top crowdsourcing websites, Microworkers lacks strong customer support. If you have an issue, finding help is next to impossible.

With easy access, comes unreliable users. The jobs on Microworkers are not that well paid, so finding good people to work on your project becomes a hassle.

With more than 10 billion judgments and long-term experience, Figure Eight aims to integrate the human and machine insight to produce quality rated training data that generates the world’s most innovative machine learning (ML) and business solutions.

Moreover, it should be noted that Figure Eight’s enterprise-ready data annotation platform allows ML and data-driven business solutions to combine and scale across numerous different industries. These industries may include retail, automotive, finance, manufacturing, agriculture, life sciences, robotics, and the list goes on.

Some of the many tasks performed by this crowdsourcing platform include text and natural language processing (NLP), Audio and Speech Recognition, ML Assisted Data Labelling, ML Assisted Text Annotation, ML Assisted Video Object Tracking, Search Relevance, and so much more.

Figure Eight currently partners with some of the top technology companies and BPOs including Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, IBM Watson, and Amazon Web Services. If you are looking for a crowdsourcing platform to transform your text, audio, images, and video into high-quality annotated data then Figure Eight is the best possible option for you.

With 700,000 users, if you are an already established, this option can help you get better. Not for new innovators and startups, Clickworkers charges $400 just as a setup fee unlike most of its competitors who let you set up without any fee.

To some developers, this hefty fee would seem reasonable considering the top-notch customer support that Clickworkers provide.

Interesting fact for you, Clickworker aims to provide both the services to its valued customers: Self Services and Managed Services.

Some of the many Self Services offered by Clickworker include text, translation, survey and sentiment analysis. They offer Managed Services in case the Self Services is not the solution that you are looking for.

Services such as text, research, categorization and tagging, product data management, surveys, AI-training data, and mobile crowdsourcing are different services offered under Clickworker’s Managed Services department. You can tell them about your project and their project management team will set-up and run the project for you.

With a new mobile app in the market, Clickworker has become more easily accessible.

Having clients such as Ford under its belt and with 300,000+ users, Innocentive is quickly becoming an efficient and effective platform for crowdsourcing.

Do not get overwhelmed by terms such as “Seekers” or “Pavilion” used on this site. Once you understand their meanings, it becomes a relatively easy platform to set up.

Here is how Innocentive works:

They typically begin with their Challenge Driven InnovationTM (CDI) training workshop which will help you to identify and illustrate your problems and needs.

In the next step, their seasoned Challenge Experts will work with you to decompose and formulate the problems or needs as ‘Challenges’. These challenges are then posted anonymously & then comes the job of Innocentive’s Solvers.

The job of the Solvers is to come up with a feasible solution. In the final step, you get to evaluate the solutions proposed by the Solvers and select those to award. You only need to award those solutions that fully meet your requirements.

The only major problem that its users have pointed out is that there is no proper screening of people working on your posted project. Other than that, with amazing customer service, this is a tool perfectly suited for people who are interested in the fields of CS, advanced medicine and business management.

Oclavi is an annotation platform that focuses on providing annotation tools to facilitate models to learn effectively and work efficiently in the real world.

One of Oclavis’s major goals is to make Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning easy for the developers by providing API ready classified data. High-quality labeling output, AI and Deep learning with API ready, and classifying objects for Machine Learning are some of the major tasks you can trust this crowdsourcing website with.

Oclavi is known for providing its customers with some of the fastest, collaborative and accurate ways of annotating images, videos, and 3d data sensors. Oclavi is mostly known for its image annotation solution which will allow you to annotate Bounding Box, Polygon, Circle, Point and Cuboidal annotations with the highest possible quality. Some of Oclavis’s main features are Image annotation, Video annotation, and Medical annotation.

For predictive and imperative annotations for your AI and Deep Learning models, Oclavi is the best crowdsourcing website option you have.

Final Word

Crowdsourcing is a perfect way to know how your application or a game would perform in the market before it’s even launched. With the market becoming saturated options, selecting the perfect fit for your application/game can become an overwhelming task. Since you want the best services for your buck, and a perfect system by the end of it, crowdsourcing is one step that you cannot afford to compromise on.

Before committing to one tool, I suggest that you do thorough research. Be confident of what your project requires and what is being offered by the website/tool. Once you have jotted down the requirements, you are ready to embark on the crowdsourcing journey.