People act according to the expectations that they have of particular contexts. When most users visit this site, particular schemata in their brains are activated that will signal them that this site is probably a blog. The typical interface of a blog contains comments on the bottom of each post, extra information or other posts on the left or right and some sort of navigation-menu. Of course blogs can vary in their presentation, but most of them stick to this basic format. The reason why this format works is simple; people instantly know where to look for information and wether this information is relevant to them. Nobody wants to waste time trying to figure things out that are supposed to be easy.
The expectations users have of our website is that it's a social travel network. Meet people working in the arts around the world, find treasures hidden in the underground. You can even become a guide yourself and guide others in the rural scenes of your city.
However becoming a guide is extremely difficult. It's almost impossible to do without instructions of the editors. I discovered that it's easy for users to set up a profile and add contributions to their city. The trouble begins when I make them aware that they have to set up a guidepage and put all those contributions inside, as well as more information of them being a guide (usually this information has already been put in their profile) to become a guide. This is the point where it all goes wrong, they loose interest and stop contributing. It's just too much.
So why was the guidepage introduced in the first place? Because of the open-CI with Mediamatic. The first guides that joined the project already had a profile at Mediamatic, so the open-CI issue had to be solved. The project however is growing and growing with each new member registering a Travel-profile. It doesn't make sense anymore to have the guidepages linked to a Mediamatic profile.
Discovering hidden places of the underground is also a very time-consuming task. The problem here is that all the contributions that need to show up in the city-page are randomly displayed. Moreover the citypage can only show approximately 30 contributions which results in guides asking me why their contribution doesn't show up in the citypage. The reason is that we just have too much contributions and while it's great having a large number of contributions, it doesn't really come in handy if you can't guarantee visibility and find-ability of the content. On the other hand, if we let all the contributions appear, you'd have to scroll all the way down to see all the contributions and that's just as invisible.
Contacting guides has been made very easy though with the introduction of the 'flap'. Just click the 'guide me' button ;)
We need to work on the expectations users have about our website. It's kind of an indication of the success of our project, because all the problems we are experiencing right now how to do with the growth of the network and the content. The questions we need to address are concerned with how to handle such data. The website is growing and we need to rethink what kind of tools and applications are necessary to keep up with the growth.
I'll launch a questionnaire soon addressed at the guides of our project in which they can express their preferences and what they think of the project so far. I will especially try to get an answer to my main concern: Do we really need a guidepage? Isn't it easier/more fun to contribute to your city (along with co-guides)? We'll find an answer to that question next week.
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