I looked into the Mechanical Turk site, and it looks a bit confusing to use. It requires html editing to create survey questions - it's literally like creating a small website for people to access to take the survey. They give some example questions so you can copy the code, so I'm hoping I don't have too much difficulty with it because I have little html experience. The class where I will learn html is next semester unfortunately.

Today/tomorrow my mentor wants me to figure out how to use Mechanical Turk. Unfortunately there are no helpful tutorials online or on the site. She also wants me to change my PowerPoint presentation into a flash movie, but she doesn't have a program for me to use. She said she used one in the past and will contact someone she worked with to see if they remember the program. She also wants me to make a website to put the flash video on.

I sent her an email saying I couldn't figure out Mechanical Turk enough to complete the survey and I needed the name of the program she used before. Luckily I found a program that let me video capture my screen so I took the video of my PowerPoint presentation that way.

During our last meeting, she had showed me a different site to make surveys on that was significantly more user friendly.

Thankfully she agreed to let me use Survey Monkey - the user friendly survey creation site instead of Mechanical Turk. I finished up the survey and converted the presentation into a video, posted it on YouTube and made a website to host the video.

My mentor emailed me saying to fix some minor things late last night, like making the video shorter and editing a slide and the website, so I did that this morning. I emailed her saying I fixed what she wanted fixed and I never heard from her for the entire rest of the day. I sent a second email asking her if everything is done so the survey can go live.

Update: She finally responded really late at night.

Still trying to figure out Mechanical Turk. Anyway, we're meeting later today and I'll update then. Hopefully everything will be finalized.

Update: I'm supposed to convert the entire Survey Monkey survey to Mechanical Turk now. That won't take me long but why did she let me use Survey Monkey in the first place if we were going to use Mechanical Turk?

I converted all my ranking questions to simple radio questions because that's the only thing I could figure out how to do in Mechanical Turk. We set up the survey with a test of 17 users. The results came in within 45 minutes which was very surprising and I was really thankful for. After glancing at those results my mentor gave the green light to add more spots for people to take the survey. We added another 65 or so. That took about a day to get all the survey spots taken - with having to deny some of the submitted surveys due to blank questions or conflicting answers.

It's very obvious that Mechanical Turk is in beta. It's a fantastic idea and with more time I think it will really take off. But as of now, it's a bit difficult using the site. Only being able to make questions with html is a no-no, and I can't figure out how to turn off email notifications. There's also confusion between the "worker" and "requester" portals, both being almost separate from one another. There are some layout issues/confusions with the site too. I hope they finalize and move MT out of beta eventually. It has a lot of potential.