User Experience Design within the Shar- ing Economy and Collaborative Con- sumption: A case study of the SpaceMaker company

Abstract

The Internet has played a major role in the development of Sharing Economy communities as well as helped spread awareness and reach for Collaborative Consumption communities. Web services regarding these topics have become very popular in many countries, but there seems to be a problem regarding the motivation of users into the engagement within these communities. The major barriers seem to be the inconveniences (such as security issues, transportation of goods and communication) when interacting and the triggers to start doing so.

This project proposes an on line application to help solve these issues. By motivating the user to organise and catalogue her possessions at home, the tool helps bring the intentions of organising and transforms them into intentions (and actions) of sharing, by applying gamification methods, behavioral changing models and a complementary service system for the SpaceMaker company.

Using the companies established remote storage as a service solution, the tool proposes the sharing of items as a new way of solving the problems of house organisation and storage space. The design was carried as a human-centric process: Provided with an extensive market research, some user personas were identified and documented. Five fitting users were then approached and interviewed in two separate rounds. A first round to tap into the needs and wants and a second round to see reactions to technological solutions to the problems found.

With these results several user journeys are proposed and the user experience is designed following the companies restrictions on it's identity. An initial implementation was started which should provide a solution to transforms user's intentions of organising at home to actions of sharing within these Sharing Economy and Collaborative Consumption communities. These results represents the bases for the a new line of products for the SpaceMaker company which will have to be user tested and iterated upon in order to make a more compelling impact in the users.