Attention Tasks
Surveys
Paid surveys are a popular way for marketing companies to collect the opinions of people from specific segments of the society and tailor their campaigns to achieve the best results. In addition to the commercial application, surveys are greatly valued in politics where the needs of the citizens are the top priority.
All surveys, marketing or not, are typically targeted to a specific demographic which can be big (e.g, students) or rather small and precise (e.g., mothers of 30+ years of age, living in Liverpool) based on their goals. Once a user fills out a simple profile, the app will use them for screening, i.e., select the surveys the user could be a good fit for according to the information they have provided.
Application testing
While earning through app testing is not as popular as getting paid for filling out surveys just yet, more and more IT companies are hopping onto the train of getting their apps tested by regular users instead of only passing them through their in-house Q&As. While most user behavior can be predicted, it’s impossible to think of all the possible scenarios.
By turning regular users into beta testers, companies can view their creations through their eyes and understand which functionalities seem unclear or unnecessary, and which should be added to smooth the user experience. No IT knowledge or experience is needed: most mobile apps are not targeted at techies specifically, so they need to be made crystal clear for the general public.
Ad watching / listening
Even though advertising is a multi-billion dollar industry, it’s far from invincible. Technical solutions like ad blocking browser add-ons and skipping and fast-forward capabilities for broadcast television programming allow people to avoid ever seeing ads, thus lowering the consumerist tendencies and saving their time. Always hungry for more brand awareness and sales, marketers have come up with a novel approach: pay people for viewing their ads.
A user is paid a fixed fee per every ad they watch (if it’s a video) or listen to (if audio). Out of all the microtask types in the Attention Task group, this is the most passive one: to collect a defined fee, the user does not have to do anything aside from paying a little attention to what's presented to them on their mobile device’s screen. The ads to watch can also be presented as parts of offerwalls that also include other microtask.
In this category of microtasks, the users will have to have to provide a tangible action to earn money. It will still not require any special training or extended time commitments – however, simply stating your opinion (as you would in a survey) or watching something (like an ad) won’t suffice.
Action Tasks
Translations
Written translations are among the most popular freelancing activities – however, they usually focus on bigger projects which take more time and require a worker to not just know multiple languages but also have writing skills and potentially even specialization (e.g., legal and medical terminology).
Translating small pieces of texts such as words and phrases is different: since there is no context or surrounding text, there is also no need to worry about the natural flow of the text or complicated language structures. Crowdsourcing the work of JumpTask’s users will speed up and simplify translation processes (including localization of websites and apps) making them more cost-effective and accessible for small businesses.
Image interpretation (AI training, Captchas)
Artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the most important innovations of the XX century: teaching machines to complete simple and mundane tasks without human intervention allows us to focus on more complicated processes. However, to be trained effectively, machines need to be provided with a lot of data it could learn to recognize patterns in.
Crowdsourcing where thousands of users worldwide complete a few microtasks each enables us to get massive sets of data that can then be used to train AI. For example, by taking a selection of images and marking the ones that have zebra crossings in them, users can help train self-driving cars to understand their surroundings better, and solving captchas can help immensely with text recognition.
Data collection
Gathering web data might seem like a simple task, but the needs of companies and organizations are often too massive to be handled in-house – moreover, in some cases, location-based restrictions might arise. The option of using automated bots was prevalent in the past – however, these days, they are typically detected and banned.
For this kind of microtasks, the user would find the data needed on the web and input it in JumpTask's application. The user would be paid per action, and businesses could effectively use JumpTask’s user base as an alternative to web crawlers. Simple examples of relevant data could include (but not be limited to) statistics, pricing information, or email addresses.
Transcriptions
Just like translations, transcriptions (converting spoken word to written form) are typically big projects for freelancers. It’s common to transcribe conferences, lectures, speeches so the information provided is easily searchable. However, the process is terribly time-consuming: transcribing one hour of audio in four hours is generally considered to be a standard. This also means that a recording that ends up in a professional’s backlog can take days and weeks to be completed.
Transcribing individual phrases or sentences, however, is a great option for organizations that want to save money and time they would. Since all submissions are verified, forgoing professional transcribers doesn’t result in loss of quality – moreover, since it’s not as time consuming, more people can afford to help you at once, which eliminates the wait.
Manual web testing
When building and perfecting a new website, developers get so used to all the menus, dropdowns, and sections it gets hard to evaluate user-friendliness and the ease of navigation properly. Unfortunately, bumpy user journeys can result in serious losses: studies show that 48 percent of buyers have left a website and shopped elsewhere due to poor experience.
The best way to identify the issues a real user can encounter is by using a fresh set of eyes, i.e. allowing actual web users to test your website. Third-party reviews show how user-friendly and easy to navigate a site actually is – moreover, it reveals inconsistencies or cases of unclarity and enables the team to do required changes in time.
Other Tasks (TBA)
JumpTask plans to introduce more work modules in the future – however, the team will focus on the more imminent goals. The ultimate plan is to introduce more basic tasks prioritizing more common ones. In the future, the team will move to more difficlut task development and microtask aggregation. AI development and similar tasks that might be harder (and take longer) to program but allow JumpTask to boost its efficiency in catering the needs of both businesses and earners.