User’s understanding of reputation issues in a community based mobile app

Abstract

With the emergence of the Web 2.0, (digital) services are coverging and moving into the digital and mobile world, producing lots of information in real-time, such as traffic conditions, points of interests and so on. With the big amount of collected data from community-based applications, it becomes necessary to know wheather such content is trustworhty. When using applications such as Waze, we are supposed to trust in the information provided by unknown users, which act as digital content producers. However, it needs to be transparently clear where this information comes from and how trustable are its providers/endorsers. This paper presents the results of a two-step study to investigate how users recognize (or not) the signs and the reputation model of digital content producers in Waze app. We analysed and found out how the reputation is communicated to the users and the potential impacts on human computer interaction.