The use of microtasks to break down large-scale collaborative projects into small chunks that can be conducted individually and with little need for coordination between individual workers. 

Microtasks in Crowd Work

Approach to support communication of task context between requester and crowd workers using short, structured tasks. The goal is to reduce the effort of communication and maximize guidance. 

Structured Communication for Complex tasks 

The most common participants in behavioral/psychological studies tend to be American college students, but with the rise of the internet, other forms of sampling have become more common, like using Amazon MTurk.

Separate but equal? A comparison of participants and data gathered viaAmazon’s MTurk, social media, and face-to-face behavioral testing

- Unlike microtasks, which support workers such that they would not require much expertise or context, macrotask crowdsourcing depends on workers with expert knowledge in one or more domains.
- While simple tasks can be easily decomposed and accomplished through microtasks, macrotask crowdsourcing can benefit complex tasks that involve open-ended and innovation-oriented work. 

Macrotasks in Crowd Work

- Complex tasks require situated action: constant reflection, revision, and adaptation toward one’s goals. The more complex the task, the more necessary adaptation becomes.
- Workflows streamline the work process, reducing the margin of error. 
- However, workflows are static, limiting situated action. As such, complex tasks have traditionally been difficult to achieve using workflows.  

Tradeoffs of Using Workflows to Complete Complex Tasks

Complex tasks are characterized in two ways: 
- (1) intellectually, they require reasoning and non-repetitive creativity and 
- (2) organizationally, they require multiple people working in multiple roles with interdependencies among the microtasks they perform


Macalester College

Small jobs that requires a low level of skill and takes minimal time to complete. Microtasking is the process of splitting up a large job (macro-task) into smaller jobs.

Microtasks/ Microtasking

Mengyao Zhao and Andree van der Hoek (2015) A Brief Perspective on Microtask Crowdsourcing Workflows for Interface Design. 2015 IEEE/ACM 2nd International Workshop on CrowdSourcing in Software Engineering. Department of Informatics. University of California, Irvine


A Brief Perspective on Microtask Crowdsourcing 
Workflows for Interface Design


More resilient to interruptions, yield higher quality work, can be used to scaffold the cognitive process of maintaining and rebuilding context for complex tasks and make tasks more engaging 

Microtask characteristics

Completing a set of microtasks in succession. The ways that microtasks are ordered in a chain affects the extent to which people complete the tasks productively and accurately and continue to engage with subsequent tasks.

Microtask Chaining

A predefined series of microtasks designed such that the output of the set of microtasks can be used to successfully complete a larger task. While most existing microproductivity approaches currently expect task structure to be provided up front, workflows can also be developed dynamically.


Workflow

- 1) decompose large tasks into microtasks, 
- 2) efficiently complete each microtasks, 
- 3) source microtasks to the most appropriate actor.


3 Areas of Microtask development (The future of Microproductivity) 

Soliciting support from peers (via “friendsourcing”) or paid crowd workers (via “crowdsourcing”) is easy with microproductivity, because sharing a self-contained microtask with another person requires almost no coordination overhead. Microtasks can be allocated to the most appropriate person depending on the required level of expertise, the person’s availability, and their familiarity with the task. 

Microtask Sourcing 

Mobile devices offer people the opportunity to get useful tasks done during time previously thought to be unusable. Because cell phones have small screens, they’re useful for short, simple tasks. The researchers in this study designed a special app, Play Write, whose purpose is to make complex editing tasks more fragmented and achievable while working on mobile devices. Results suggested that the app made participants feel more productive and less stressed, and they completed more edits on a document using the app.

Multitasking with Play Write, a mobile microproductivity writing tool

Complex Tasks in Crowd Work

Priming has been used in the realms of psychology as a way to alter people's behaviors or performance. It can be overt (supraliminal) or covert (subliminal). A subsequent behavior, which is a result of the priming, occurs typically without conscious awareness. In the field of microtask crowdsourcing, multiple types of primes have been used to increase and alter people's performance.

Priming to Increase Performance in Microtask Crowdsourcing

Differences have been noted in terms of performance between microtasks and macrotasks. These are related to the time taken to complete them, their quality/accuracy, and the workers' preferences. There are also differences in the effects of interruption on micro- and macrotasks.


Performance Differences In Micro- and Macrotasks

Microtasks can give people a sense of accomplishment early on in the task, which can help with motivation. Concrete progress with lots of feedback contributes to a sense of self-efficacy, and completing microtasks is functionally efficient and helps with motivation, so people are more likely to be productive for longer.

Microtasks and Motivation

The process of breaking large tasks down into microtasks such that each microtask contributes towards the overall goal.

Task Decomposition Definition

While microtasking is more pertinent to work environments, it can be used in educational contexts to ameliorate students' performance. Teachers can implement microtasks into their curricula to help students who underperform compared to their peers.

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