As I was saying few days ago, I’ll be in Trieste at the ICTP for the School and Workshop on Structure and Function of Complex Networks for the following 2 weeks. The school is free (UNESCO funded) but I’m on my budget for the accomodation and meal so I tried HospitalityClub and CouchSurfing. On Monday 9 May (evening), I searched for people offering hospitality in Trieste and sent a message to all of them (almost 20). The morning after I got several replies (all on HospitalityClub), all of them very kind offering help and one of them offering me hospitality for the entire period (16-28 May). Incredible!!! Actually as truesmile told me in one of the following emails: “no, non e’ incredebile che ci sia brava gente al mondo, e’ incredebile che non ci crediamo piu!!!” (“no, it is not incredible that there are decent people in the world, it is incredible that we don’t believe this anymore”). So I’ll stay in robby‘s house for the following 12 days! truesmile will lend me her bike and I will meet a lot of new “friends”: rocana, alessia1305, igmaru! Sweet!
User Interface note: There are much more users on HospitalityClub than CouchSurfing and this is incredible because CS is a great site, very usable, good looking and perfect, while HC is unusable, with a poor graphics. I didn’t investigate the reasons but I might guess that HC’s code is written by users themselves that feel HC as a creature of them, while CS is perceived as a great (commercial) tool created by someone else: it is not so, CS’s creator is a great guy and one of the CS users but maybe this is how it is perceived.
Can it be the case that, on social software sites (for non web programmers), crappy graphics and lack of usability is a feature?
Anyway, if you are a Web designer, would you like to give some advise on how to improve HC’s graphics and usability?