This research was intended to reveal useful insights about currently poorly understood connections between a users website interactions and their attitudes towards the content of the website, specifcally the services and products that the website may represent or depict.
This issue has wider sociotechnical signifcance than merely determining the click-through rate of frustrated users on online directories, as the “products” on display can be people's livelihoods and the effects of the interaction can potentially reach beyond the boundaries of the screen into peoples businesses and careers.
Used well, online mediators like the Multi Sided Markets studied in this research can facilitate real events more smoothly and economically than any real market or forum. The existence of ebay and facebook are testaments to the power of unifed human communication through social media. They are successful, thriving virtual neighbourhoods, sociotechnical success stories where real needs are being met to such an extent that people willingly choose to invest time in these virtual spaces at the expense of time spent in 'real' activities (Ellison, Steinfeld, & Lampe, 2007). While they are not without their perils, they have the power to enrich life by successfully enabling what would otherwise be impossible or infeasible.
Online directories also show the potential to greatly enhance users access to services and increase the cost effectiveness for businesses promoting themselves online (Rysman, 2004). Unlike the aloof mechanisms of traditional business directories, which are handed out complete and fully formed for the consumption of the masses without room for their commentary, online directories can close the feedback loop by allowing users to comment and review services, and in the process paradoxically increase the value of the platform for both the users and the businesses seen on it, by increasing the pool of engaged users, enhancing their trust in the information and reducing the cost of information discovery (Jullien, 2005).
But when the systems and platforms and directories mediating the transactions fail to support the full needs, both practical and emotional, of those people who are visiting and transacting on their websites, they risk becoming at best abandoned ghettos on the web, or degenerate into lurid red light districts flled with fashing messages for services users really don't want. This is the social-technical gap at work, often perhaps caused by a fundamental misapprehension in the minds of the platform owner of the real purposes and meaning such systems have to the actual consumers and businesses who use it.
It is doubtful that the owners of the many low credibility online directories surveyed in the process of this research set out to provide anything other than a useful service for user and
businesses alike. Yet this study shows that it is all too easy to engender negative emotions by neglecting the human aspects of the mediating platform. Malice is not required, just a lack of vision. A sociotechnical system like a Multi Sided Online Market must be conceived and built as if it were an environment, a pleasant online neighbourhood where people might actively want to meet each other, and spend time. Ignoring human emotional responses in design is to repeat the same failure of the imagination that lead many post war modernist housing estates to swift decline and demolition. It is not enough to technically meet the needs of users with a 'machine for transacting' if the device itself is so intrusive that it inhibits the desire to transact at all.
Yet this pursuit of function at the expense of form is a recurring failure in technology design. The experience of interacting with a system invariably changes our attitudes and performance on that system. Tractinsky et Al suggest that “positive affect is likely to improve decision making and creativity. Thus, the positive affect created by aesthetically appealing interfaces may be instrumental in improving users' performance as well” (2000, p. 141).
Clearly, there is a need here to better understand the mechanisms at work, but despite attempts to quantify aesthetic quality with principles and models as seen in this study, and many before, we are not yet at the point of a Science of Aesthetic Design. Good design remains for now a product of human creative whimsy, frustratingly unpredictable and fugitive.
And even good online neighbourhoods can “go to the dogs”. While good design can help make an online directory a place where all parties can transact and communicate with confdence and clarity, these platforms often contain the seeds of their own destruction. With the advent of so many competing 'freemium' advertising-supported directories, the potential exists for the excessive or desperate pursuit of the advertising dollar to send these platforms into a downward spiral of perceived credibility. Strangely, it seems, at least from the fndings of this study, that it is these third parties, Advertisers, fellow actors sharing the stage as it were with the users and businesses doing the actual transacting, who have the greatest impact on perceptions of credibility. The neighbourhood itself may be good or bad, but it is bad neighbours that seem to be the true problem.