Amazon Mechanical Turk - Worker and Requester Interfaces

Worker and Requester Interfaces

After visiting the home page of Mechanical Turk website, users have the option of either becoming a worker or a requester. The worker and requester interfaces are different, to accommodate the needs and purposes of each respective role. Workers have access to a dashboard which displays three different tabs- Total Earnings, Your HIT Status, and HIT Totals. The Total Earnings tab displays the earnings that a worker has received from completing Human Intelligence Tasks, the earnings made from bonuses, which can be received from any Human Intelligence Task, and the total of these two. The Your HIT Status tab displays a list of daily activity and daily earnings, along with the number of HITs that were submitted, approved, rejected, or pending that day. The HIT Totals tab displays information about either accepted or submitted HITs, which include the percentages of HITs that were submitted, returned, or abandoned and the percentage of HITs that were approved, rejected, or pending from those that were submitted.

Workers complete HITs by looking through the large database of HITs that are available through Mechanical Turk. Some HITs, however, require qualifications, which workers earn through either taking a qualification test or by acquiring certain benchmarks such as completing a certain number of HITs or having an approval rate above a certain percentage. Mechanical Turk Masters are Workers who have demonstrated consistent accuracy on specific types of HITs across a wide variety of Requesters. As of September 2012, there were two types of Masters: Data Categorization Masters and Photo Moderation Masters. Masters are granted access to higher levels of work and access to a private forum.

Payments in Mechanical Turk are all done cooperatively with Amazon Payments. A requester has a different interface which is designed to assist the user in creating tasks for other users to complete. A requester is presented with many different templates from which to choose in the design of a HIT which include a writing, survey, translation, categorization, and other templates. A requester has a wide range of flexibility in the design of a HIT as it is completely up to the requester how to design, publish, and manage their HITs. After publishing a HIT, the HIT is put on the HIT database for Mechanical Turk workers to complete.