Ask The Crowd is the exciting new UX tool powered by Toloka

Fact: when you’re really good at websites and you’ve spent 100 hours building one, you might lose touch with how an ordinary user would see it for the first time. That’s why it’s crucial to test things on real people. Usability testing can be incredibly elaborate, involving dedicated laboratories, screen recordings and eye tracking rigs.

But what if you need an answer within the next five minutes?

The team at Ask The Crowd developed an elegant solution that integrates Toloka. With their new app, getting feedback is like turning on a tap.

So how does it work? It’s simple.

Let’s follow along step by step.

• You submit questions via the website
• Ask The Crowd sends these questions to the Toloka API
• Tolokers answer the questions
• Toloka sends the answers back in JSON format
• Ask The Crowd turns the JSON data into something nice and pretty
• You sort and tag these answers with an easy interface
• Your results are ready

It’s all done in a matter of minutes.

Let’s see it in action

Imagine you sell electronic devices and you need an icon for drones.

We don’t yet have a single, widely recognized symbol for that. There are many options.

So which is most clearly a drone?

There are two ways to use this platform. You can ask a survey, where respondents select from multiple choices. Or you can ask a single question, where they type their answer. This time, we don’t really want to offer multiple choices, because it gives a big hint as to the right answer. It would be much better to see what they come up with on their own.

Instead, let’s ask a single question for each icon.

Submit your questions and icons. Then go and make a tea or coffee — or sing nearly all of Bohemian Rhapsody. Five minutes — that’s how long it takes to get the results.

Sorting the answers

You might be surprised how many ways folks identify something as a drone. They can write “drone” or “a drone” or “quadcopter with camera”. It might even be a “dron” or “dronne”.

Ask The Crowd lets you tag all these answers with an A, B or C.

In this example, we can use “A” for a drone and “B” for anything else. In just five minutes, we learned which of these icons was most recognized as a drone, and which was least.

Toloka and the power of the crowd

Toloka can help in almost any scenario, whenever you need actual humans to answer a question. We even used it to test our new logo.

Integrating Toloka can be a straightforward way to provide a useful service to a particular audience. For Ask The Crowd, all it really took was a web interface connected to the Toloka API.

Toloka gives you access to a crowd that’s always on call, around the clock, that scales as you need it and can get things done in minutes. Use the power of the crowd to bring an MVP to market fast, and to validate new ideas even faster.