How to Design a Digital Sharing Economy Platform Which Evokes a Sense of Meaningful Work among its Users?

Abstract

In this paper we examine design affordances which are necessary for providing users with an optimal Sharing Economy app experience. We begin by reviewing literature around Sharing Economy, User Experience, and meaningful work, to arrive at a structure for our research and to extract the psychological needs which would need to be considered. We follow this by carrying out 8 interviews with young workers, some of which have had experience working with Sharing Economy platforms such as Wolt. We examine their work life, and the psychological needs therein satisfied or not. We continue by exposing our research subject to a digital prototype - a new open-ended type of a Sharing Economy app. Our prototype is focused around simple jobs in public spaces, such as park clean-up or small repair. In our concept, job completion is reviewed by several members of the public, rather than the singular customer, like in large-scale SE platforms such as Uber or Wolt. We conduct a contextual enquiry on users interacting with the prototype, using it as a probe. Through this we try to gauge how our changes to the typical SE platform structure influence the psychological needs of the worker. Then we ask the work-life questions once more, this time focusing on a more hypothetical scenario in which our subjects are workers in a fully deployed version of our prototype. We ask them about their psychological needs again to see what psychological reactions our design changes managed to provoke. In our research we are guided by a number of theories around User Experience, affect, and meaningful work. Our main reference for primary research design is Hassenzahl's list of primary psychological needs. We have found that a list-based approach to psychological needs does not fully reflect the reality of the worker's experience, and that some of the needs - competency, autonomy, and relatedness - display much greater saliency, and deserve to be isolated from the existing framework, and given additional weight as a modulating force for all the other needs. We find Sandelands, Locke, and Ryan to approach the problem using theory which fits our data more accurately than Hassenzahl. (Sandelands, 2000) (Locke, 1976) (Ryan and Deci, 2000). We find the main needs to be inter-related, rather than existing in isolation as a list. For further research, we propose a new iteration of our original design, which takes into consideration the input we have received from primary research. This iteration takes the form of user interface mockups, illustrating new features of the prototype, aimed at psychological needs reported to be crucial for an optimal SE app work experience.