CrowdUX: A Case for Using Widespread and Lightweight Tools in the Quest for UX

User studies and expert reviews are established methods for evaluating usability and user experience (UX) in user-centered design. However, practitioners often struggle to integrate these often time-consuming and costly methods in their design processes. As technological products and services are becoming increasingly mobile, their contexts of use are increasingly diverse and less predictable. While this changing context is hard to capture in lab studies, the same mobile technologies also provide possibilities for new study methods. In this paper we advocate lightweight mobile tools for crowdsourcing UX feedback. In cooperation with a design agency, we built two apps that allow users to express feedback with text, ratings and pictures whenever using a product. The second app assigns feedback to categories, while the first does not. In a case study we compared the quantity, relevance, and nature of the feedback collected with both UX evaluation apps to traditional evaluation methods. The feedback collected with the apps was considered highly useful by designers and provided more user stories and context than traditional evaluations.