Case Study: The Challenge of Representing Trust

The case study that is presented in the following sections describes work on a specification for a novel online resource that stores and manipulates profiles of partners that are based on a number of dimensions, including expertise and trust. The specification has been produced by a project team funded by the EC and is based on the experience of three practitioner partners in the project. These are firms who need to find partners online, or need to configure multidisciplinary teams where work will be distributed, time is short, and there is little opportunity to establish acquaintance. The rationale for the specification draws heavily on the material that has been reviewed in the previous sections. Trust is operationalized as a set of systematic responses to an identifiable set of concerns and issues. The specification, thus: (1) captures appropriate concerns; (2) presents these in a systematic way; (3) captures responses to concerns; (4) captures assessments about these responses; (5) presents these assessments as a set of profiles that reflect judgements about trustworthiness.

The design challenge is to provide a framework that represents levels of interpersonal and situated trust in the formation stages of online partnerships. As the specification must be relevant to the work of the commercial partners, the approach that is taken is scenario-based design (Carroll, 1995). This focuses on what people do when they are engaged in particular activities. Narratives of a situation (in the case of this project, of teambuilding and partnering) are transformed by a series of systematic translations into semiformal accounts of interactions with technology in context. The process begins with user stories that are gathered and elaborated into scenarios, or structured storylines of actions, goals and objects in a given situation. These in turn are transformed into higher level "typical" or "abstract" scenarios that describe generic activities and generic actions with technology in these contexts. From these higher narratives, a series of concrete scenarios can be constructed. These envision, in detail, what actions, what movements and what objects can contribute to the achievement of goals in a number of contexts. These vignettes are then translated into use cases, or high-level specifications.

The group writing the formal specification has used the narratives of experienced practitioners (the key informants who are the project's commercial partners) to identify relevant narratives of partnership, or "user stories." These have been gathered in written accounts, and elaborated in brainstorming meetings where "abstract scenarios" have been constructed. The output from the concrete scenarios that have emerged from user scenarios has been presented in the form of interaction patterns (Borchers, 2001) that capture potential regularities of usage and activity. The concept was first applied in architectural design (Alexander et al., 1977) by Christopher Alexander and provided templates for activities in a repertoire of community spaces and proposed that a "pattern language" might articulate the interplay of activities and space in human habitats. The concept was adopted by software engineers in the 1980s, and has recently been promoted by Erickson (2000) as a "lingua franca" for interaction design.