Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation in Design Critique

Paid crowdsourcing platforms, which harness the extrinsic motivation of monetary compensation, are seeing increased usage for design feedback tasks, but the low quality of design feedback from crowdsourced workers continues to be a problem for designers. Intrinsic motivation has the potential to increase the quality of worker responses, but is difficult to elicit in paid workers. In this paper, we present the results of a study performed on the paid crowdsourcing platform Mechanical Turk in which we investigate the effect of introducing intrinsic motivation on the quality and character of workers’ responses to a design feedback task. Workers were assigned to either an intrinsic condition, where they were allowed to choose the topic of the design they would give feedback on, or an extrinsic condition where they were assigned a topic randomly. Analysis of results showed that giving workers a choice of topic did not affect the quality of their responses but did cause them to write more, more efficiently, and more confidently than workers in the extrinsic condition.