Entry #2
Second Entry. The first of two projected parts. Yesterday I spoke with the other members of my group regarding ideas for the group report. I offered the best of my limited ideas for consideration. It is one that I had conceived earlier, and was reminded of by the Urbanseed (?) dating example that Tania showed in the first class. It is essentially a similar web-based community service provider, but in this case the community is those looking for a room/house to rent/share, or those with a room/house to rent/share.
The inspiration for this came in January when I was looking for a new share house to move into. My two main sources of advertisements for vacancies were the Readings bookstore noticeboard in Carlton, and the website http://melbourne.gumtree.com.au. I had used Readings before with success, and found that this time again it provided me with some very promising accommodation opportunities. The reasons for this are many.
First of all, a description. Readings reserves one large window behind the front counter which looks out onto an alley for the posting of accommodation notices. For a gold coin donation anyone offering or seeking accommodation can post a notice in the window. The only restriction Readings places on these notices is that they not exceed a certain size, perhaps half the size of a postcard. So, the appearance and content of the notices in entirely up to the poster. As a consequence, there is absolute freedom for expression, and many of the notices indicate a great deal about the personality of the poster. A discerning viewer can easily eliminate half of the offerings, or choose to focus on only a handful. It may be the handwriting, an illustration, the aesthetic, the humour, an attitude, a description. Any of these things can aid the viewer by suggesting some affinity between them and the poster. Conversely, it can also screen, or filter out applications that may be unwanted.
You can even extend this process of filtering further and apply it to the location as a whole. Readings is, as Wikipedia puts it, “a hub for literary and musical connoisseurs since the 1970’s”. Being located in Carlton, Readings is also in the centre of Melbourne’s student ghetto, although with increasing gentrification, the opportunity for many students to live in Carlton is rare. Still, it is located at the gate of the city’s inner northern suburbs, home base for a large percentage of students. So you can argue that the majority posters and seekers frequenting the Readings noticeboard are likely to be young, white, middle-class, educated people. This is not to say, that Readings, or the people using its service would discriminate against groups not included in that assessment, in fact most would be at pains to protest the opposite, but generally I believe that to be a fair generalisation. And as such, they can feel safe in the knowledge that advertising through Readings or applying to those advertisements, will likely ensure interactions with those of like-minds or at the least, similar circumstances.
The Melbourne Gumtree website is the local version of a UK website, which is according to their own description, “a local London classified ads and community site, designed to connect people who were either planning to move, or had just arrived in the city, and needed help getting started with accommodation, employment and meeting new people”. Essentially the demographic of people using gumtree.com.au would be similar to those who use Readings (I used both after all), but I also get the impression that gumtree caters for travelers, backpackers and people who are in Australia for other reasons and are familiar with the site from their interactions in other countries.
What differentiates gumtree from Readings is that all notices are generated from a series of text boxes that the poster fills in. The boxes allow the poster to enter a location, price, posting title, posting description, room type/size, posting category, availabilty to couples, date available, contact e-mail address/phone number, and pictures or video. Providing information for any of these sections in up to the discretion of the poster, and most advertisements feature a combination of only a few. So while there is greater freedom for describing the subject of the advertisement, most posters stick to the basics. As a result most gumtree ads appear the same. A few lines, perhaps paragraphs of text, and occasionally a photograph. Looking at advertisements on gumtree quickly becomes a process of simply identifying a couple of relevant factors that correlate with the needs of the viewer: location, price, number of occupants.
This anonymity, or the homogenizing effect the website’s structure creates, also produced one instance where I suspect I became the potential victim of a scam. I answered an advertisement for a room to rent in Carlton, reasonably well priced for its location, fully furnished, all extra requirements like broadband included, with three photographs of a very luxurious room, comfortable living space and tidy kitchen. The reply that I received from the advertiser was positive, but because she was out of the country, attending a wedding in Edinburgh, I would not be allowed to view the property; but I was expected, to pay a bond in advance to secure the room, which should be transfered to the bank account of her stepfather, who resides in South Africa.
The dubious nature of an arrangement like that, and the advertiser’s poor grammar and english expression, would indicate to myself and hopefully most viewers that this was not a deal to be made, but the structure of the website allowed for the situation to occur. The advertisement could have been posted from a computer anywhere in the world, let’s say Africa, and it would still appear to be another accommodation notice posted with that day’s other entries.
So, gumtree suffers from security concerns and an inabilty to convey as much of the personality of the poster as Readings does. Where both fail however is in their approach of presenting a need of the user (a room/a housemate), which is so tactile and intuitive, as text. Most people are familiar with the experience of going to a share house interview and discovering one, or both, of two things. Firstly, that the people that they are meeting for the first time are not people that they would like to live with. And secondly that the room they are being shown, or the house or as a whole, is not a space in which they can imagine themselves happily spending a large proportion of the hours of their days for an indefinite period of their life. Because as great as the feeling of affinity we imagine for the poster of the advertisement at Readings may be, their is no substitute for experience.
Or is there? Or can we create a system that improves the current situation? It occurred to me after my thirteenth interview in two weeks, that there had to be a better solution. Why wasn’t there a website, like gumtree, that allowed users to advertise themselves or their rooms, but personalize, humanize the content so that the interface was much more like socializing websites like mySpace, Facebook or Friendster?
What if someone seeking a room could create a profile for themselves on this hypothetical website. The range of information that could be entered about them is expanded, and because the categories and systemized, the user is encouraged to comply with them. Rather than being unable or unwilling to write that difficult short summary of who they are, they are given the opportunity to enter a series of what the German sociologist Max Weber calls “elective affinities”: their favourite films, books, artists, designers, their political/sexual orientations, their ideas and beliefs, examples of their work, creativity or taste. There are limits to how much you can divine about a person from what they offer to present of themselves to you. But it does provide an improved forum for the user seeking accommodation to present themselves. And it allows the people advertising rooms to learn more about how appropriate someone who applies for the room might be. I attended interviews with some advertisers who were seeing as many as twenty applicants in one afternoon; others that many across weeks but only after preliminary phone interviews.
For the advertiser, it is still difficult to represent the spacial and metaphysical aspects of a living space, but apart from similar individual profiles from which the applicant can use for the same purposes, perhaps a section describing the rules and expectations of the house, and the responsibilities of those people entering it may be helpful.
These ideas are in a very early stage of development, but the idea seemed to be popular with my group, and no doubt, upon further consideration, the possibilities of such a website will be refined and expanded. So we’ll see what comes of it. I still don’t even know how relevant it is to the principles of interaction design because I haven’t done the reading. Yet.
