Design tool development for non-monetary accommodation sharing platforms

Abstract

Iconic sharing economy services, such as Airbnb and Uber, have faced serious problems in terms of public policies related to legal liability, insurance, and taxation. However, non-monetary sharing services, such as Couchsurfing, are free from such conflicts and are still successful owing to their noninvolvement in monetary transactions. The goal of this thesis is to develop a design tool that supports designers ideating non-monetary accommodation sharing platform services. To achieve this goal, an exploratory study and two main studies were conducted. The exploratory study aimed to investigate the need to conduct independent user study on non-monetary accommodation sharing service platforms. During the study, 60 user profiles and 360 reviews of Couchsurfing and Airbnb were collected to analyze host user and guest user behaviors. This study found that both the host users and guest users in each platform have distinctive behaviors. The aim of Study 1 was to investigate distinctive host user behaviors of non-monetary accommodation sharing economy services compared with host user behaviors of monetary services. Host user behaviors were comparatively analyzed using semi-structured interviews with 12 hosts from Couchsurfing and Airbnb. The analysis result indicates distinctive Couchsurfing user behaviors

for instance, Couchsurfing hosts write their profiles and room descriptions for the purpose of meeting friends, while Airbnb hosts write these to avoid conflicts with guests. The aim of Study 2 was to investigate the overall host user behaviors collectively with guest user behaviors. Semi-structured interviews with 12 Couchsurfing users (6 hosts and 6 guests) were analyzed. The analysis specifically determined the purpose for being involved in each stage, and details for achieving this purpose. The results from the studies were applied to create the design tool. The tool was improved through two designer workshops. Then, two additional designer workshops were carried out to determine the advantages of the tool. The idea triggering boards and the method of presenting the behavior cards were improved using feedbacks from the designer workshops. The tool had four advantages in terms of supporting designers to: implement a holistic system design, ideate at the in-depth level, feel empathy with non-monetary accommodation sharing service users, and consider interaction between users from two different parties (hosts and guests).