As part of a module on Design Anthropology, we conducted a team project looking into trust-building in second-hand goods exchange for the product team at Gumtree. They wanted to better understand the exchange experiences and motivations of London-based buyers and sellers on the platform, and we chose an on-the-ground ethnographic approach to better understand notions of trust-building and success in these exchanges.
We recruited five participants in and around London, exchanging items ranging from cars and bicycles to large animals. We used techniques ranging from semi-structured interviews to visual analysis, shadowing exchanges and a co-design session to analyse what makes these transactions successful and how to improve user experience. Our findings included detailed mapping and analysis of buyer journeys and user profiles, but building an understanding of the varying conceptions and uses of trust in these stranger interactions was what I found most interesting. It was one of the reasons I ended up focussing on trust for my dissertation research.
Trust is not a linear, one-way journey of accumulation. It oscillates throughout the transaction, and manifests at certain moments. And for people who know exactly what they want, processes of managing trust online may not be utilized; trust may not need to be built at all.
I later based a course paper around interviews with one of our participants from this project, exploring the Facebook horse community’s navigation of the platform’s ban on buying and selling of animals as an example of disobedient distributive design.