Designing Platforms for Crowd-Based Software Prototype Validation: A Design Science Study

Abstract

Designing a software product based on early user feedback aligns it faster with the user’s needs rather than validating them after the development. This feedback can be provided iteratively on software prototypes before the development to judge the idea behind the product and save development resources. Here, crowdsourcing techniques can be used to collect feedback from many potential users. However, less research focused on software support for this crowd-validation process. Therefore, we conducted a design science research study with three design cycles to develop a platform for software developers to support the prototype validation process using the crowd. We present abstracted design knowledge in the form of design principles and an overall solution concept together with a situated implementation of design features and a software artifact. Our research contributes knowledge to software designers in research and practice designing new and extending existing tools with iterative crowd-validation support.