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Feedback is an important aspect of design education, and crowdsourcing has emerged as a convenient way to obtain feedback at scale. In this paper, we investigate how crowdsourced design feedback compares to peer design feedback within a design-oriented HCI class and across two metrics: perceived quality and perceived fairness. We also examine the perceived monetary value of crowdsourced feedback, which provides an interesting contrast to the typical requester-centric view of the value of labor on crowdsourcing platforms. Our results reveal that the students (N = 106) perceived the crowdsourced design feedback as inferior to peer design feedback in multiple ways. However, they also identified various positive aspects of the online crowds that peers cannot provide. We discuss the meaning of the findings and provide suggestions for teachers in HCI and other researchers interested in crowd feedback systems on using crowds as a potential complement to peers.

Writing articles involves searching, exploring, evaluating and reflecting upon different perspectives. To this end, online search engines are commonly used tools to support writing. However, online search engines, such as Google, fall short in supporting complex queries that satisfy multiple criteria simultaneously. In this paper, we present our studies with GAS, a crowd-powered tool that allows writers to discover viewpoints, solutions and ideas that best fulfil multiple criteria simultaneously. Our user studies validate GAS as a beneficial companion to online search engines in supporting writing. We found that GAS helps people come up with ideas and write with more confidence, resulting in a higher self-reported article quality and accuracy when compared to only using an online search engine. Through our experiments, we also develop an understanding of the distinct process that people employ when searching for and exploring open-ended, subjective information to support exploratory writing.