Chain Reactions

Abstract

Microtasks are small units of work designed to be completed individually, eventually contributing to a larger goal. Although microtasks can be performed in isolation, in practice people often complete a chain of microtasks within a single session. Through a series of crowd-based studies, we look at how various microtasks can be chained together to improve efficiency and minimize mental demand, focusing on the writing domain. We find that participants completed low-complexity microtasks faster when they were preceded by the same type of microtask, whereas they found high-complexity microtasks less mentally demanding when pre-ceded by microtasks on the same content. Furthermore, participants were faster at starting high-complexity microtasks after completing lower-complexity microtasks, but completion time and quality were not affected. These findings provide insight into how microtasks can be ordered to optimize transitions from one microtask to another.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 51 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.