User satisfaction determines the quality of a product idea. Yet it is hard to accomplish when designers are isolated from their users, creating a gap in the design practices. Co-design seeks to meet the needs of users by giving them a voice in the design process. Technology-enhanced learning provides an ideal testbed, as co-design practices on learning content are well-established between instructors, e.g. in instructional design. The challenges are first to convene geographically distributed users to collaborate on design of software applications and second to scale up to a high number of users. We present Pharos, a platform where designers can request feedback from a community of people with different backgrounds. It combines co-design with crowdsourcing to enable mass feedback. A user evaluation showed that designers preferred structured feedback from a crowd of users rather than open-ended critique from co-designers. Based on the evaluation, we discuss possible improvements of Pharos and motivate further studies. The resulting Web application is available as open source software.

Keywords: infrastructuring, crowdsourcing, co-design, design feedback