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Ask HN: Is there a site where a crowd can vote on which A/B site looks better?

8 points by EGreg ↗ HN
I want to be able to test (and prove to others) which version of a site looks better. Maybe asking specific questions, as well. Like 1, 2, 3 or 4 versions side by side. And people answer a couple questions about each, or just vote which one they "like" to look at the most, which one looks more "professional", etc.

Ideally, such a site would already exist (sort of FaceMash for designs, or HotOrNot for designs) and would have a large crowd already, which logs in and gets a bunch of random things to vote for. Random with a limit of N per day because we don't want people to game the system by inviting their friends to vote for a specific one.

12 comments

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jtokoph
Amazon Mechanical Turk is probably your best bet: https://www.mturk.com/
BlameKaneda
I did Mechanical Turk surveys on and off for about 8 months and all it netted me was about $25. But, I bought a nonstick pan with it.
savrajsingh
Applause.com but they’ll harass you forever w their sales team
mv4
LinkedIn.
Tagbert
Normally, how an A/B test works is that you present those options to different users and then you compare their behavior to some designed outcome. It is almost never a matter of asking users to choose between options. You are just giving them the different versions and then measuring their engagement levels. Engagement often measured by sales or click through rates. The one with the most engagement wins.
rgavuliak
What looks better and what drives more revenue/conversions are often very different. The data collected this way might not be useful at all.
ianmabie
https://www.usertesting.com - you can upload screenshots / prototypes / the actual webpages (if they exist) and have users go through a series of questions. You can also set it to scramble the order to see how that (if at all) changes preferences.

As other folks called out, this can give you a sense of customer comprehension / stated preferences & reasons why, but may not give you the level of confidence a true A/B test would (launching both iterations & splitting traffic amongst & measuring conversion difference)

shoo
see also: Kohavi, Ron, Diane Tang, and Ya Xu. 2020. Trustworthy Online Controlled Experiments: A Practical Guide to A/B Testing. Cambridge University Press; https://experimentguide.com/
tchock23
Pickfu.com might be what you’re looking for…
terrycody
I think you can apply for Google Search Quality Raters, these people exactly doing this every day.