design assignment∞

A Discussion of Two Poor Design Elements in Ayrintilar.Com

This paper will discuss two shortcomings in design of ayrintilar.com that lead to sociability problems and under-participation. Ayrintilar.com is a website for sharing moments from everyday life by posting short writings. Members can disclose their observations, thoughts, tastes and memories under the sections named: “What I Like”, “What I don’t Like”, “What I can’t Forget”, “My Details”.

Under-Exploitation of the Rating System

Making consumption and contribution visible affects member behavior (Chen et al., 2003). As Chen et. al argue, establishing contribution level to have status or attain certain privileges is thought to be increasing user motivation to contribute. Ratings are a way of making a member’s contribution visible, as high rating means more contribution and generally, older membership. With a well-working rating mechanism, the members have a motivation to contribute more in order to have a higher rating and a better status in the community.

The postings in Ayrintilar can be rated by the readers assigning a number between 0 and 10 to the postings. Each time a posting is rated, the ratings up to that point are averaged and the average becomes the post’s new rating. However, this system is not effective and a great opportunity to increase participation is missed. First, the ratings are associated only with the postings, not with the members who wrote them. Each posting has a rating between 0 and 10, and the total rating of a member’s postings is not visible, so the members are not motivated to increase their ratings. Second, each posting starts with a 0 rating, therefore it’s not possible to differentiate an unrated post from a bad post actually rated 0. Third, the ratings are not cumulated, but averaged. It’s not possible to track how many people rated the posting, so one can not know if a rating reflects general opinion of all members or only a single individual’s view. Two posting rated 10, one rated by 100 members and the other by only 1 member, both have a rating of 10, which makes the ratings meaningless. Probably the members also perceive the current ratings as meaningless, because the usage of the ratings is not frequent, and most of the posts go unrated. As the contribution of a single individual changes the resulting rating more sharply in the averaging system as opposed to the cumulative system, the ratings are open to be used to favor a friend or to take revenge on an opponent. More importantly, since the ratings do not add up to the individuals’ ratings, they don’t act as incentives and don’t help increasing participation.

In addition to restructuring the ratings by associating them with writers instead of individual posts and changing the calculation from averaging to summing up, another suggestion about employing the ratings to increase participation would be expanding the tasks that acquire ratings. The site has a great potential to develop relationships and create rich interactions, and in many cases that happens, however, the potential is not fully used. Interactivity, as defined in Schoberth et al. (2003) as “the extent to which messages in a sequence relate to each other, and especially the extent to which later messages recount the relatedness of earlier messages”, is not observed frequently at the site. Message replies and discussions around a posting are not as frequent as they could have been. If there were more discussions and more interaction around messages, bonding and relationship building would occur more often and more strongly. Expanding the rating notion to assigning ratings for messages and replies would be incentive to start discussions around postings. Moreover, if members’ rating is increased by 1 at each site visit, this would be another incentive to visit the site more often and follow the activities more closely.

Making the rating of the user visible next to the nickname is also a standard application to make the contribution and status visible, and it would be useful in Ayrintilar, too.

Failure to Articulate the Site’s Purpose

Articulating the site’s purpose clearly is required for high sociability (Preece and Maloney-Krichmar, 2003) and it is important in order to attract a particular audience (Kim, 2000). Ayrintilar fails to state its purpose and to provide the users with community norms or site policies, making the site hard to understand and increasing the possibility of inappropriate usage. New visitors have no guidance to the community, and the only way to understand what the site is about is browsing the pages and reading old postings. Even after new member registration, only a short and plain welcome message is sent to the member’s inbox, without any explanation of the policies or norms. The only information provided is that the postings are subject to moderation and may not be displayed if the post is not in compliance with the site content, however, no description of the site content is given. There is no “About” page.

Ayrintilar has approximately 700 users, most of which know the site by word of mouth . It is not advertised, and mostly attracts new members by referrals of friends. This referral system may be decreasing the negative effects of the lack of information about the site’s purpose and expectations as friends referring the site are likely to describe what it’s about; but still it would definitely help to include this information to form a common understanding among the members and avoid confusion for the first time visitors.

Site descriptors slightly communicate the tastes of the community, however, they provide only tacit cues and some serve only for humor. One suggestion other than providing direct information about the community would be telling the background story of site’s foundation. Kim (2000) states that “A strong, mythic backstory can help a culture thrive” and it can help the community building.

REFERENCES

Chen, Y., Kiesler, S., Konstan, J., Kraut, R., Resnick, P., Reidl, J., & Terveen, L. (2003). “Designing on-line communities to enhance participation -- bridging theory and practice”. A proposal to the National Science Foundation”

Kim, Amy Jo (2000) “Community Building on the Web”. Peachpit Press, CA.

Preece, J. and Maloney-Krichmar, D. (2003) “Online Communities.” In J. Jacko and A. Sears, A. (Eds.) Handbook of Human-Computer Interaction, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc. Publishers. Mahwah: NJ. 596-620

Schoberth, T., Preece, J., Heinzl, A. (2003). “Online Communities: A Longitudinal Analysis of Communication Activities”. Proceedings of the Thirty-sixth Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. IEEE Press: Washington, D.C.