10 suggestions for improving Freecycle

I joined Freecycle a few months ago and was amazed at how many people were happy to give stuff away for free - managed to get a computer desk, a large plant and a rubbish bin from generous freecyclers. However because of major problems caused by the way Freecycle is handled via a basic email group, I've more or less stopped using it. These problems could all be easily solved by an eBay-style website dedicated to the specific needs of Freecycle. Here are the features I'd love to see in a future Freecycle website.

1) Instead of locally-based groups there is just one global network. All users tell the system their location and the system does the rest for them. Currently I am a member of the Kensington and Chelsea Freecycle group. However, since I don't own a car, the majority of the offers in the group are too far away to be relevant to me and I would rather not clutter my inbox with them. In my proposed system, people would be able to customise what they want to be notified of. So, for example, I could choose to be notified of everything offered within 1 mile. However, if I was desperate for a microwave and would be willing to travel 25 miles to pick one up, I could set up a custom notification which notifies me of every offer within 25 miles which includes the word 'microwave'. Advanced users could perhaps set up multiple locations (e.g. one for work, one for home).

2) User profiles with a record of how many things the person has given away, and how many things have been taken. Currently Freecycle-type networks are wide open to flagrant freeloading. People are free to take and never give or take what is freely given and then sell it on for profit. With a record of who has the best give/take ratios, the best givers could be rewarded in some way. The system could give them advance notice of offers or, at the very least, when faced with a number of wannabe takers, a giver would be free to choose the person who has given the most him/herself. This would result in a virtuous cycle, with more people making the effort to give.

3) An eBay-style reputation system, where givers rate takers. This would stop people from turning up late, or not turning up at all, and getting away with it. Again, this makes things easier for givers, encouraging a virtuous cycle of more and more giving. It would also help people worried about letting strangers into their home, or going into stranger's homes. They could choose to only make arrangements with people with well-established reputations and, in any case, the website would have a record of who made an arrangement with who, putting off people with bad intentions.

4) Givers would not have to write a new message if a pick-up for their item had been arranged - their offer would automatically be marked as reserved.

5) Takers would be able to see at a glance if an item has a 'must-go-by' date.

6) Offered items would appear with any photos posted of them. In the current email groups (the ones I've been in at least), photos have to be hosted separately, which can be very frustrating and confusing.

7) People would not have to put their rough location when posting; that would be done automatically by the system. Likewise other people would not have to look up the location themselves - the system would just tell them that the item was '23 miles from your home' or '7 miles from your work'.

8) A private calendar where givers can put when they are free for takers to come and pick things up. Takers can just click on the time they would like to pick up the item, vastly simplifying the process of arranging mutually convenient times. The calendar would only be visible to the chosen taker and only until a pick-up time was arranged.

9) Likewise, your location could automatically be shown on a map to successful takers, saving the trouble of repeatedly explaining where you live.

10) People would more easily be able to search for existing open offers before posting a 'wanted' request. Currently, people have to search the email group (a non-obvious concept to begin with) for offers, and then check again to see if the offer has been taken, and then email the person directly to make sure the offer is still open. Unsurprisingly, most people don't bother and consequently the email groups are filled with unnecessary 'wanted' requests. In a dedicated website, none of that would be necessary as offers would be automatically marked as 'reserved' when a giver and a taker arrange a meeting, and would not be visible in searches

I really hope something along these lines is implemented some day because, right now, Freecycle I something I want to love, but just find too annoying to use.

Too much information: Present and future strategies for combating RSS fatigue

And here's a much smaller research report I wrote in early Summer as part of my MA. It's an analysis of the various attempts to manage the enormous volume of potentially useful/interesting information available to us via the internet through RSS/Atom feed readers.

Too much information: Present and future strategies for combating RSS fatigue

Here's the introduction:

Humans have always passed on interesting information and have always been looking for interesting information to consume, but never before has this information been so accessible for and so valued by so many people. RSS feeds, and the newsreaders, or ‘aggregators’, used to read them, were designed to make life more convenient for such people... Instead of users going to the websites for the news, the news now comes to the user. The result is RSS ‘inboxes’ that daily fill up with hundreds of new articles and, consequently, that symptomatic problem of the modern age ‘information overload’:

Take a day off and you're behind. Take an hour off and you just missed 300 more blog posts. (Sarah Perez, ReadWriteWeb)’

This report will consider the existing strategies for combating what has been dubbed ‘RSS fatigue’, taking in both their strengths and limitations, before concluding with an assessment of what the future must bring if these limitations are to be overcome.

An unsuitable match: Social media and User-Centred Design

The defining characteristic of social media is a revolutionary undermining of the distinction between producers and consumers of media. Instead of producing content, social media services merely facilitate user interaction. Given this, one would have thought that the tenets of User-Centred Design (UCD) would be highly pertinent to the design of social media. In fact it is very difficult to find a major social media service which was created via a genuine UCD process (almost as difficult as finding an interaction designer who does not wax lyrical about the importance of UCD). Blogger, craigslist, Delicious, eBay, Facebook, Flickr, Gaia Online, Last.fm, LiveJournal, Skype, Wikipedia: none of these pioneering legends of social media were born out of the ethnographic observation techniques, 'personas', 'scenarios', low-fidelity prototyping or constant pre-development testing that characterise UCD. Why don’t UCD techniques seem to be necessary for the creation of great social media? I propose five main reasons, not all of which are peculiar to social media.

1) Self-centred design is a valid approach
The history of social media is full of examples of designers designing for themselves and then finding that their designs are immensely popular with others. When Delicious founder Joshua Shachter solved his own information management problem, millions of others were waiting for someone to solve the same problem. When Blogger’s Meg Hourihan and Evan Williams and LiveJournal’s Brad Fitzpatrick wanted an easier way to update people about what they were doing, millions of others wanted the same thing. Because these designers were designing for their own requirements, they didn’t need to research user requirements to develop a great concept.

2) Personal experience can be an adequate substitute for user research
In those cases where a social media service was not created to serve the founder’s own requirements it can still be said that the founders had a good understanding of the user requirements, not through UCD research techniques, but through their own experience. In the cases of Facebook and Last.fm, the designers had a good understanding of their target users—students and music fans—because of the milieu in which they worked and socialised.

In the cases of EBay, Flickr, Skype and Wikipedia the focus is on activities which are common to virtually all web-users: buying and selling, photo-sharing, making phone calls and looking up articles in encyclopaedias. These activities are so well-understood and nearly-universal in the developed world that it simply wasn’t necessary for the founders to know any more than they already did through their own everyday experiences.

3) The nature of social media discourages early prototyping
One thing that is striking in the stories of social media entrepreneurs is the credit which most of them give to their users for shaping the design of the service. Social media makes it very easy for users to give feedback about the service and for their digital imprint to be monitored. This may not be as valuable as the face-to-face observation advocated by UCD, but it is much more convenient.

Moreover, it is relatively easy to redevelop social media services. UCD grew out of traditional 3D product design, where there is an immense gulf—financial and technical—between a prototype and a working product released to the public. In contrast, the Web makes the distinction between an online prototype and a finished product almost arbitrary. But while post-development prototyping is easier with social media, pre-development prototyping is actually harder because the social interactions of a community of users cannot be simulated. Thus the nature of social media tends to encourage the suspension of pre-development prototyping in the knowledge that the most valuable results issue from post-development prototypes.

4) An emphasis on simplicity offsets the need for User-Centred Design
Basecamp stands out amongst social media success stories because of its dismissive attitude to user feedback. Its nonetheless immense popularity can be partly explained by its founders’ belief ‘that there is beauty and wisdom in Web-hosted, bite-size software built to accomplish narrow tasks’. Skype cofounder Niklas Zennström shares these sentiments: 'Skype is easy enough to use so that people don’t need to be tech savvy… If you can use a Web browser, you can use Skype’.

Anything which conscientiously focuses on providing only the broadest and most essential features in a simple, easy to grasp interface is very likely to be highly usable. It seems that an emphasis on simplicity and an awareness of usability principles can be adequate substitutes for guaranteeing usability through usability testing.

5) Implementing a User-Centred Design process is often not worth the required time and expense
None of this is to say that UCD is actually detrimental to good design. It is difficult to imagine how UCD techniques could do anything but improve design. Unfortunately, good design is not the only factor contributing to the success of a product: expenses and speed are both vital factors and both can sometimes be adversely affected by UCD processes.

A disclaimer
Of course not all social media services can be designed in a simple and straightforward form that makes usability a given; some activities are necessarily complex. Likewise, it cannot be imagined that for every potentially successful social media service there is an available designer with sufficient relevant personal experience to be able to design it without user research. The rise of niche social networking and enterprise 2.0 is likely to strengthen the need for UCD research techniques in the design of social media. Niche groups and businesses are going to require specialised, potentially complex, social media services which cannot be created by designers relying on personal experience and an emphasis on simplicity.

Finally, it is important to note that UCD is not an ‘all or nothing’ approach. The User-Centred Design process can be broken down and simplified so that only the aspects which are most needed are used. Some form of pre-development usability testing of an interface is almost always worth implementing.

With these disclaimers it is possible to conclude that while cheaper and nimbler alternatives render UCD generally unsuitable for the design of social media, UCD should never be rejected entirely and looks set to become less generally unsuitable as a result of future trends.

N.B. This is a summary of a much larger article User-centred design and the user-driven web: Is a user-centred design process suitable for social interaction design?

Out with the old, in with the new

I've just finished my MA in Interactive Media and have decided that my portfolio website no longer reflects what I'm about. I started the MA with happy dreams of being a Flash bunny and ended it with much more compelling visions of interaction design and innovation, i.e. less artistry and programming and more information-management and usability engineering. My old website doesn't reflect that focus; hopefully this blog will.