Wisdom of Crowds
I'm always looking for novel and inexpensive ways to get user feedback, especially for our non-profit clients. Formal online survey tools offer organizations an in-depth look into the users' minds, but many are expensive and time consuming to create and execute. Here are a few crowd-sourcing sites I’ve found to supplement my user-research toolbox:
Ask500People
Ask500People gathers votes on its own website and through widgets on thousands of other sites. Each question is open until 500 votes are in. Incoming votes are displayed on a map in real time, with the voter's location is retrieved from the computer IP address. IP tracking also allows the website to limit votes to one per computer.
While the site is an open community, Ask500People also offers premium services. For USD 100-500, a company can poll 500 internet users on any topic, and have the results within hours. Survey results for corporate polls are private and the company's identity is invisible to the respondent.
BuzzDash
BuzzDash is another site that offers a similar but more complex approach to online polling. In contrast to the simplicity of Ask500, BuzzDash offers an overwhelming dashboard of questions and categories, but you can escape the complexity of the interface and poll your site visitors by publishing 'buzzbites' on your own website.
Kluster
As an entire platform built around crowdsourcing, Kluster has introduced several new tools to help get good, fast feedback. Kluter supports collaborative brainstorming by allowing participants to share their opinions in a Private Kluster. Participants can submit or vote on ideas or solutions based pre-defined, weighted criteria. The Kluster results let you see how much support an idea has, from whom and why, as well as whose support will be essential to make it succeed. Klusters can support unlimited numbers of participants in a secure environment. After a 30-day free trial period, pricing begins at $27 for up to three projects per month.
Any good interactive firm knows, as James Surowiecki writes in "The Wisdom of Crowds," that groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them. When our clients come to us as trusted experts, we turn to the wisdom of masses. These engaging online tools help us tap the fountain of knowledge without blowing the budget.
