Designing for online sharing communities

Abstract

Sharing, a consumer behavior as old as mankind, has been revived in the late 2000s in the form of the sharing economy, a term that encapsulates innovative solutions for the sharing of goods and services online and presents an alternative to traditional ways of consumption and ownership. Financial benefits and sustainability are often referred to as reasons for why we share online, but with the rise of commercial platforms like Airbnb and Uber sharing motives are more and more questioned. This popularity of online sharing has been powered by digital technologies. They are the driving force behind this trend providing various opportunities for sharing online and opening new research areas for Human Computer Interaction (HCI).This thesis further examines and questions users' motivations and requirements to sharing and consequently sets up guidelines for the designing of sharing platforms. 15 interviews with users and administrators of three different Vienna based sharing communities provided the basis for analysis. Since the scope of this thesis has been limited to platforms offering the sharing of goods without any compensation the two Facebook groups „Share \& Care Wien“ and „Wien verschenkt“ and the website „myfoodsharing.at“ have been the systems of choice. Although the interaction practices between the Facebook groups and the independent „Foodsharing“ website are rather different, four main reasons for sharing online were identified across all platforms in the course of interview analysis - in particular self interest, idealism, altruism and sociability. These findings revealed that users show different attitudes towards the interaction with the platform and its members depending on their motivations for using the system.Users with certain motivations show specific ways of how they interact with others and the platform. They have therefore specific demands on the system, resulting in the creation of design implications according to these motives. Since users show more than one reason for why they share, along with the design guidelines established in this work design modules can be plugged together to create various platforms for different purposes.