Social Interaction Design: Structure

This post is inspired by today's excellent reflection On the thoughtful use of points in social systems by Adin Levin of Socialtext. Adina summarizes a twitter conversation that unfolded yesterday among "Kevin Marks, Tom Coates, Jane McGonigal, Tara Hunt, Josh Porter and a few others on the thoughtful use of points and competition in social systems."

I'm going to spin this off in a different direction for reasons of my own, but I highly recommend visiting Adina's post.

I want to address just a few somewhat philosophical points salient to the social media design field in general, and important to my own practice of social interaction design more specifically.

There's an intrinsic tension between three key positions, each of which we should have an understanding about. They are:

• the user
• the system
• the social media professional

Why the third? Because we observe user actions and build or implement social media systems, and therefore have notions about the other two, how they inter-relate, and need to reflect on our notions to better understand how they shape what we can do.

The user has interests and motives that we will never have complete access to — in fact by most accounts the user himself isn't aware of the reasons or causes of all his actions and choices. But the user matters to us because we do claim to take a user-centric approach to social media design. And not for no reason: capturing user interests and producing compelling and engaging social experiences is what it's all about.

And we recognize that there's this vast and complex social field there in which all manner of reasons, motives, incentives, interests, goals, and what have you that might account for what users do, why, and whether they will do it again. We won't know all of that, but for that we should not consider the user a black box, or explain user behavior on the basis of causes external to him or her. The user supplies his own motives and experience.

Now there's a natural tension between user-centricity and design. For the explanations of user action are subjective — anchored in the user's own stream of activity, and embedded in the user's experience of friendships and social structures that span time and space.

Design, however, needs objectivity. Things, elements, operations, ordered in support of functions having functionality. In short, uses.

Now, in the old days, that is, pre-social software, we could conflate the user and the use case. All was neat and tidy. The user was what her use of the software was, the use case described that use, and the system's success was a clear binary situation. We could describe users by their needs (I need to do this "because of" motive) or goals (I want to do this "in order to" motive). These supplied the utility served by means of transactions with the software. Easy pass/fail system problem: was the software successful, efficient, and effective.

Design requirements could then be articulated on the basis of user flow, activity, or action sequencing (wizards step the interaction for simplicity and effectiveness). And more. The point, in other words, being that we could structure user action with elements, codify button functions, articulate requirements for screen content, layout, and navigation, and even structure time. Then, according to the system's primary functions, we could filter data, sort results, and order them on the screen — using many tried and tested best practices.

Now, as professionals interested in designing and building social media, we need to consider a) the user experience b) the system design and c) our own perspectives and understanding of how a) and b) inter-relate.

• We can take a roughly causal view of it: the user responds to design constraints.
• Or a normative view: the user is constrained by the norms and values of a community of users
• Or a functional view: the user has needs and goals, and uses social media to accomplish these with and through other users
• Or a psychological view: social media present an external psychosocial world onto which users project their expectations, and from which they internalize the meanings of interaction outcomes
• Or a communication view: users maintain relationships and engage in communication through social media as they would in daily life, with varying notions of what social media are, do, and of the people who use them

And there are other views, some of which pertain strongly to brands (users have passions), to marketers (users consume brand messaging), to mass media (user eyeballs have moved to social media), to customer service (users have the power), and so on.

My point being that each of us, as social media industry practitioner, likely has a take on this that leans in some direction or another.

I often find that design, engineering, and product folks tend to have more objective explanations of What Social Media do and how they work. Marketers, PR, Sales, etc have a more people (user) centric view. And so on.

We need both, but we also need to know the limits of our own perspectives — else we run the risk of confusing what it means to us with what it means to the user. And of confusing how the design works with what the user is doing. They are not the same.

Social interaction is a particular kind of action. Social action is oriented to another person. It has the relationship of "I : Thou" or of "We." Now the fact that social media are media — that action is mediated by means of design elements that have their own "meanings" and by language as writing, sight as image or recording, and interaction through navigation — this all matters, for any social action is not directly social but mediately social.

Terms like proximity, connection, relationship, conversation — we need to recognize that these are terms applied to a world that is phenomenologically constructed and ontologically absent. Or better, imagined. I am, now, typing into a little box talking to you, attached to a little box. Terms we use to describe the social evoke precisely the social attributes that world is missing. It is missing proximity, connection, relationship, and conversation. Just a point worth making.

Clearly this point serves little purpose aside from dusting off our idiom a bit, but clarity in perspective requires a good wipe now and then.

So, to where I wanted to go with this. Social interaction needs to accommodate users, as individuals. Needs to accommodate users with other users (social action, communication, and social practices). Needs to accommodate design (structure of elements and resources, rules, functionalities, and systemness: structure in and over time).

Anthony Giddens has a nice take on this. His view, called "structuration theory," claims that social structure is a duality: it is real, but doesn't exist unless reproduced by people constrained and enabled by it. The user has agency, structure constrains and enables action. This is perfect (IMHO) for social systems.

He makes three helpful distinctions around structure:

• structural principles: Principles of organization of societal totalities
• structures: Rule-resource sets, involved in the institutional articulation of social systems
• structural properties: Institutionalized features of social systems, stretching across time and space

I find these very useful. For the challenge is in trying not to confuse design and structure with causality (that a user responds to constraints). And it permits seeing the ways in which social "stuff" happens when users begin, haphazardly and around a particular tool, app, site (etc) to form practices (the sticky). For social practice is structuring: relations, behavior, expression, meanings.

There is "structure," then, on the social side and on the design side. And in between, the interactions and communication are how the whole thing is reproduced, constantly, daily, all the time. (And why flow and streams are such an important shift.)

There is more to say here on interaction and communication (language has structure, interaction has structure), and how users use each to relate to each other, while also supplying the juice that turns the social media engine. But this was meant to be a quickie and I don't want to violate your sense of good and proper form.

(I will say, though, that I think it's in articulating social practices that supply social organization, use of symbolic elements that stabilize meanings used in social media (little design features, nav, icons etc), and then how the system transforms communication into infomation and social content, about which it offers system messages, views, aggregate data as a reflection of the system on its own use by users.)

So I think that as we move forward in our approach to designing the social, we might reflect on our positions and approaches. By doing so, we might shape the field, and I think it's an emerging one, so that we can see how practitioners with different areas of focus and experience fit together.

Social Interaction Design simplified

I have been asked recently to explain Social Interaction Design (SxD) in simple terms. What it is to design and designers, and to user experience design fields in particular (interaction design and information architecture). But also what it is to social media in general, including application development, social media business design, strategies, and their execution.

Folks who know what I'm trying to do with Social Interaction Design know that I'm after a description of individual and social practices around social applications that starts from the user experience. This is important to me and to the theory and framework of SxD for a simple reason. If the framework is to be accurate and valuable it needs to account for social dimensions intrinsically (not by metaphor, analogy, or anecdote). That is, grounded in the individual experience. For there is no "there" there in online interactions — all communication and interaction is lifted out of the context of place, and dislocated from the continuity of time and presence that frames our face to face encounters. (Social interaction online is not "like" interaction face to face, but is different for reasons worth exploring.)

Starting from the user experience also forces the designer, architect, marketer, strategist, or other social media professional to think from the user's perspective. Thinking from the perspective of product, problem, solution, utility, or branding is fine, but excludes the experience: what people do, why, and how many people "together" produce social outcomes.

The user centric approach here is deeper than it is in conventional design for the simple reason that social interaction involves users interacting with users. Not with the screen, with functions, features, elements, content, navigation, or what have you. And not with the brand, product, or service. Users don't talk about brands, they talk to each other. How they talk to each other in ways that also bring attention to a brand is what is interesting to me — and requires a more holistic approach to social media than use of media as media.

....

While I resist anecdotal descriptions for the reason that I'm after the dynamics of social from a view of participation, I'll use one here to see if I can better convey what I'm talking about.

Take a lunch. Lunch is a meal. One might explain it as a means of satisfying the universal human need to eat food. This would explain lunch from the perspective of satisfying "needs." This is true, but it's an inadequate description of what goes on when we're having lunch

[Google meets our "need" to find information.]

For example, there's is the matter of what's for lunch. Lunch has content. The food itself is not just food to be eaten for the satisfaction of metabolic conversion into energy. It comes in all different forms: recipes, menus, dishes and all the rest of it.

[Twitter has created a new form of talk.]

But the lunch itself is also not the sum of it. Our fellow diners have different tastes, and what's tasty to one may be just so-so to another. If food tastes good, "good" is not an objective property of the food. It's the experience of those of us who think the food is good.

[Foursquare combines the social of popular places to go with the personal recommendations of things we think are good.]

But the meal served, good or not, is again not the sum of it. Where are we going for lunch? And what's "where?" In choosing where to have lunch together we may run through many different kinds of restaurants, and compare them on the basis of quality, price, reputation, style, ambience, and so on. (Is it hip?) Regardless of which attribute we agree on, and by which we choose our lunch place, the value choice we have made is not objective either. Value is in how we value. What's a valid reason for choosing our lunch place, say "it's new and it's getting popular" may not be valid for another (it's overpriced; it's not the real thing).

[Yelp is about taste and opinion. Reviews illustrate the many ways in which users disclose their tastes, identify with merchants, and express their values.]

And what about who's going? Are we friends? Co-workers? Are we having a work lunch or lunch to catch up with each other? Surely these are important social aspects of going out for lunch.

[Linkedin social practices, even when their design is similar to Facebook, are social in different ways.]

But in these respects, then, what matters more: the type of relationships we have (eg work); the status of our relationships (one of us is tagging along); or how we feel (bummer, because now we're going to have to listen to him complain about the boss)? If we talk about how relationships affect the experience, we have to acknowledge that there are different ways of characterizing what a relationship is.

[Facebook is popular in part because there are so many ways to engage and relate to friends near and far, new and old, from greetings to games]

And there's our communication and interactions with each other. Are we boisterous and comfortable with each other? Do we bring work to the table? Do we have lunch to talk casually about work, or because we genuinely like each other? Both, of course, could serve friendship, or serve our workplace.

[Social practices vary significantly from dating to jobs sites.]

If in fact this is a working lunch, then the social context is actually "work." Our lunch is an extension of work insofar as we continue relationships with each other as employees in a non-work environment. But this makes us better co-workers, improves the basis of our appreciation for each other, and helps out our communication. As a work lunch, this lunch works (is work of a different sort).

[Social media in the enterprise don't work the same way as public social media.]

And so on we could go. We could talk about plates and silverware. We could talk about the space and its design. Its location. Or we could talk about the service and presentation. None of these would describe whether we enjoyed lunch, or account for the "experience" in toto. None would explain why we had lunch, or be able to predict whether we will do it again (and how soon).

...

I have dramatically over-simplified this example to show that there are different ways of observing social practices, describing them, and accounting for their elements, their organization, value, social routines, and social significations.

We see similar differences taken every day in how we describe social media. You and I will at times use industry trends, business transformations, technical innovation, social habits, information needs, communication practices, designs, features, types, and more to describe What goes on with social media and How people do it.

We might attribute the medium's popularity to changes in how we connect with people. To how we talk and stay in touch. To disruption in the marketplace. To the demographics of various audiences and their use of social tools. To the fortunes of big players and the ecosystem of application developers. To the periodic success of a product or service and its trickle down effect in copying and extending hits like the iPhone or twitter. To the cultural trends like personal branding, status updates, blogging, social networking, and many more.

My aim with social interaction design is to contextualize these various and valid descriptions and observations, but to seek a deeper accounting of the user's practices and how they add up to the social practices we see, and will see emerging, in social media. My hope is to help to shape the field in ways that will result in clear assessments and insightful and useful explanations — connected, ultimately, to human experience.

Social Interaction Design: Beyond Use

Interaction design works, in part, because it is able to anticipate user behaviors. Design theory models interactions: with products or services and their features, functions, interface, and so on. And if we're reasonably competent and a little lucky, we get the outcomes we expect.

But it's one thing to model interactions with software or hardware, and another to model the social interactions so critical to social media.

The conventional (non-social) approach to interaction involves a single user experience. User-centric approaches provide ways of thinking through that user's goals, needs, and objectives. The idea being that by modeling interactions based on theoretical notions of user-centric objectives, software can be designed to successfully and satisfactorily engage with the user.

In short, the interaction is between the user and the product (software). The design methodology defines user needs and thus suggests successful design solutions.

But the methodology is based on a functionalist view of interaction and an instrumentalist view of user goals. Functionalism, grossly stated, reduces human interests to causal sequences. It is based on the idea that we know what we want to achieve, and how to go about achieving it.

This is called instrumentalism because it suggests that humans do things for a reason, and human activity is understood as a combination of acts, actions, and activities in which ends are met by appropriate means. We all know where this leads us: to a view of human interaction that can be optimized, operationalized, quantified, and assessed in overly simplistic terms of success or failure, efficiency or inefficiency, and effectiveness of ineffectiveness.

The reason this approach fails to account for interactions around social media is two-fold. First, it fails to grasp the rich social dimensions of social interaction and communication, which as we experience daily are not governed by rational and instrumental goals alone. Secondly, it propagates a misleading claim that design structures and organizes interactions in social media (because design satisfies user needs and goals) — which of course it doesn't.

Social interaction involves two users (or more). Their interactions with each other, mediated and facilitated by social media (the software), are what qualify whether a system "works" or not. But to incorporate the experiences of two users into a social interaction design methodology we need to do more than simply double up user-centricity (say, as a two-user framework). It's not just a case of two users instead of one. It's a case of two subjects communicating and interacting with each other. And that means relational dynamics.

The critical insight into a social interaction design model then must absolutely begin with human interaction. And the most fundamental idea in human interaction is that it rests on double contingency. Double contingency is the basis of inter-subjectivity: each subject intends and interprets meaning freely. The meaning experienced by one user, even if it explains some of what the user intends to communicate and do with the other user, is not the same as the meaning experienced and interpreted by the other. The contingency comes into play simply because meaning cannot be attached to the interaction, but "exists" only in the experiences of the users involved.

This generates some perplexing problems. As much as we would like to stabilize and define the interaction's meaning, there is no such thing as objective meaning in social interaction. There is only the meaning experience by each participating user. Meaning is inter-subjective, not objective. An outsider cannot know it, define it, or even observe it. Designers are the outsiders, and in social media all interactions are meaning-based, not information based. (Information can be said to be "meaningful" objectively, but interactions are meaningful only to a person who experiences subjectively.)

The fact that as social interaction designers, we have no access to the subjective world of meaning and experience of the user does not mean we lose our ability to observe and describe what's going on entirely. It means what it has meant to any professional in the human and social practices: we need to know how we know what we observe and describe, and be aware of the limitations of our knowledge acquired and explained. The meaning of an interaction, or of communication, is not what the observer thinks it is (that would be ridiculous). It belongs to experience itself, and in many ways is not even conscious to the person experiencing it.

From some perspectives this is not an intractable problem. Social interactions become consistent, recognizable, and familiar as personal and individual habits are taken up as routines, pastimes, games, and many other forms of "conventional" interaction. As long as we, as practitioners, grant that we cannot offer a complete account of the inner experience of each and every user, and that we seek instead to observe social media to find common social practices and forms of interaction, we can still model interactions and describe frames of experience in generalized terms.

(Note: The goal of social theory is to go from particular descriptions to general descriptions. User-centric design is of two-minds on this and is in some ways stricken with an internal paradox: emphasis on user experience lays claim to the particular (an individual); design for all intents and purposes can only model the general.)

Related design disciplines encounter a similar problem. One that may serve as an analogy is urban planning. Urban planning anticipates social interactions facilitated by architectural choices. It recognizes the importance of general social phenomena: traffic and traffic flow, congestion, activity, commerce, the congregation of people, and so on. Urban planners are social architects, and they can model and design for these social phenomena. They cannot guarantee that fans have a good game, but they design stadiums to the observed social practices of what people do when attending live events.

Or to take another example, multi-player games. Designers of multi-player games use social interactions as an intrinsic aspect of game play. The standard ingredients of game design — roles, positions, rules, scoring, powers, levels of difficulty, etc — are only the game's elements, rules, and design. They are not the same as game play itself. Game designers anticipate the experience of game play by their users separately from the elements which comprise the game. They work game play and experience into the design by anticipating play: taking turns, slowing down, speeding up, providing back-channels for player communication, structuring collaboration, competition, and other social dependencies, etc.

Event planners represent another example. Event planners work with their understanding of large (or small) groups of people, often bringing their sense of time, timing, and duration to bear on activity scheduling (from the rituals of events like opening and closing ceremonies, to satisfying the seemingly banal needs of audiences, such as wi-fi, name tags, coffee breaks, and swag).

There are of course other examples of disciplines and professions that are social in nature.

Designing for the social interactions of people using social and communication applications, however, is complicated by the fact that the interaction is mediated. Social interactions online are not the same as they are offline. There is less "there," there online: people aren't together, so it is impossible to describe "what's happening." Often times, people aren't interacting at the same time, so it is difficult to observe a temporality or duration. And in the absence of a sense of shared space or location and shared period of time, we lose our ability to refer to a "situation." It becomes difficult to observe, let alone describe, what's going on.

We may then be tempted to describe interactions using what can be seen on the screen: posts, messages, ratings, votes, and so on. But that would be to miss out completely on the relationships, the intentions, motives, communication, symbolic interactions, and other aspects of social interaction which transcend empirical evidence. Not to mention time, which is such a critical dimension to social interactions. For all social interactions involve references to past activity and create opportunities for future activity. Relationships are nothing if not the orientation we take to others over time, moreso perhaps when we are absent from each other than when we are present.

Designers like to talk about context. Context situates activity, and activity's acts and actions. Context situates participants, and frames their interactions for a stretch of time (an episode or period of time). Context, in design speak, is like situation in social interaction speak.

Most social encounters involve a situation. Situations supply almost unlimited possibilities for creating and experiencing meaning, using all aspects of social action and communication together. Meaningfully intended acts, taken up by participants oriented to a meaningful situation and meaningful interaction, may objectify their meaning intentions through language, use of symbols, engagement in ritualized social transactions, and so on. And because members of a shared cultural background can recognize these externalized intentions, and the languages and objects used for expression and communication, common practices can emerge and become familiar. (Familiarity breeds repetition, repetition becomes routine.)

The designer of social media must work without access to "a situation" and all the context that situations provide (which we can also describe as the framing of experience). Instead, designers have only their inherited orientation towards the user experience, and a framework of social practices continuously evolving around the media that sustain them.

(Second Note: We should note that users and experiences are different. Use cases conflate the two by combining a need, goal, or objective with the user experiencing that need, goal, or objective. It's a phenomenological reduction of the experience used to define a generalizable "case." In our (use) case: the user has the need that defines the utility of the use. This kind of definition of user experience conveniently leaves out the user interests unmet or inconsequential to an application's functionality.)

Users are not just their needs and goals; and are not just the experience they are having now. In social media, user personality differences are profound and important. It is in fact likely that certain combinations of user personality types not only work well, but contribute to the growth and success of some social media systems. Users are different and their experiences are different.

So where do we stand, given that context defined as experience and practice involves factors that transcend what can be empirically observed? And given that a reduction of user centricity to needs and goals results in misleading use cases founded on a functionalist notion of utility?

We simply don't have the language required to observe, describe, and explain existing online interactions yet. Nor to anticipate the possible field of online social interactions, let alone the probable future of social interaction design innovations.

To produce this framework, we would need to both describe the user's interactions with a social media system and explain, if not predict, the social outcomes and practices that make the application a viable social system.

There may be an aporia in the theory and methodology. To wit, a complete and systematic description and framework of online social interaction may be impossible, not because such a framework simply could not account for all that goes on descriptively, not to mention proscriptively. Rather, because much of online social interaction is rife with "failure": missed and failed communication, and failed or fading interactions.

With the breakdown sometimes comes a breakthrough. Failure, in this case, is not total. Failure may instead suggest that a design methodology oriented to success is simply the wrong approach to social phenomena.

Design normally regards its successes and failures in terms of functional efficiency and efficacy. But in social media, function is not the best metric. In fact, systems that are poor examples of design may indeed result in high volumes of use and activity: the less well something works, the more social interaction and communication may be involved in using it. We might say that people like mess and messy, or that they like to go where the action is (to quote sociologist Erving Goffman).

Can mess and failure be designed, such that social activity results? Possibly, though it might make more sense to think of mess as "ambiguity."

Goffman observed that in social situations, rituals provided a means for corrective behavior and action when the communication itself had broken down. He observed that ritual picks up where grammar leaves off: that when grammatical rules are broken, other ways of making sense are required. And this is true in social media. So true, in fact, that the entire genre may be described as a failing, error-prone, discombobulated and wholly-uncoordinated mess of a social experiment. And that it is only through the persistence, tolerance, and fascination of its users that much of social media survives with users intact.

But if this is the case, and I believe that some degree it is, then the failures, mistakes, misunderstandings, and missed connections serve to create new forms of interaction. These interactions answer the need created by failure, and take shape as gestures, communication, acts, and the myriad tacit codes of conduct that distinguish people, groups, identities, and more.

Ambiguity, unresolved and unclarified, may drive users on to repeat and reiterate their attempts at expressing themselves and obtaining a response or reply. Ambiguity may motivate those who wish to know more or understand better. Ambiguity may fuel rich and complex social dynamics in which the myriad of acts intended to figure out what's going on and how to do it in effect create what's going and how it works.

These phenomena exceed the capabilities of design to regulate or control — but not the abilities of designers to anticipate and accommodate. A social interaction design discipline oriented to regulating social dynamics, responding with agility to emerging social practices, steering social outcomes by dynamically controlling, gating, preempting, and amplifying communication by means of navigation, content layout, emphasis, symbolic objects, and channeling might promise a new kind of design. One that oriented to outcomes but which emphasizes system processes and social dynamics over structure and stability.

I do not know if this means a different kind of design or a different kind of designer. Social interaction design, to me, is not a matter of designing the screen but of designing systems for interaction. It's my impression that the boxes by which many of us design and with which we try to contain the experience need to be opened up to systems and their processes, and interactions and their social dynamics. It strikes me that user experience professionals could enjoy a rich and fascinating engagement with social media if we can further develop approaches to social interaction that accurately anticipate outcomes by means of a grasp of these dynamics.

This is by no means a finiished thought, and I welcome your thoughts and comments.

Researching social media usage: right research, wrong conclusions?

Just a short post, friends, to rant a bit about a couple social media research posts I've just come across. As invaluable good research is on the uses and implications of social media, I'm sometimes bothered by the conclusions drawn from research. I speak not as a researcher myself, and must express my gratitude to those who get their hands dirty with data collection, organization, and processing. But we all know that research is frequently conducted in order to test a hypothesis — and that consequently, data lends itself to proving the hypothesis to be correct. And there is the fact that some of this research is reported with a flair for the headline, and so the blogs on which we discover internet research may often distort or even falsely report research findings for the sake of a good lead.

I have two complaints. The first deals with conclusions drawn, I think falsely, from research conducted around online communication practices and proximity. The research used Facebook and email habits of users, and concluded that the internet is not a "global village" after all, but that users in fact communicate with people they live close to. Well the research is interesting, but clearly Facebook is not the only way in which people communicate online. And Facebook is a social network for friends. Presumably, if one included the many ways which we communicate with people we don't know: twitter, blog commenting, groups and niche networks, then geographical proximity would not look like the cause of communication. it's not the research so much as the conclusion that bothers me. and not even that the conclusion — we communicate most with people close by — is a bad one (it seems to me an obvious one).

It's the theoretical misstep that bothers me. And it applies to other and similar research efforts. Aggregate user activity, captured in data, are a problematic foundation from which to make claims (such as observations) about user motives and intentions. Even more problematic, in my opinion, is the use of research like this to explain these motives. Either the researcher, or the reporter (bloggers included), will often draw conclusions that are neither supported by data nor expressed by the data. I'm not a scientist or statistician, but it seems clear to me that a finding such as "we use the internet to communicate with people close by" neither refutes the internet's ability to collapse distance; to link disparate and unrelated people, pages, and communication forums; to aggregate commentary around blog posts; to create followings around personalities (twitter) in ways that can subvert mass media's control over image and messaging; nor proves that the global village was a utopian idea, but an idea only.

To make those kinds of claims, one would have to study not just our personal communication habits, but our habits around tweeting, "publishing" and posting, participating in groups, playing social games, subscribing to news, and much more. One would have to know how internet-based discourse networks grow and function. One would have to make cultural claims about access and exposure, oh, and participation, in media events, stories, videos, and other kinds of socialized news.

The village, local or global, is made up of far more than personal conversations. Villages have news, gossip, rumors, and secrets. So it frustrates me when research is used to collapse a concept, when research is used to support conclusions it couldn't possibly contain (because they are outside the data), and when simple stories are created as a means to explain or tell research findings. I'm sure researchers themselves are troubled when this occurs.

The article that prompted this post:

E-mail Traffic Data Casts Doubt on Global-Village Theory
mentioned at Modern Metrix

If you think e-mail is making geographical distance less important, think again. A new analysis indicates that the opposite may be true.
....
Their conclusion is that far from reducing the importance of geographical location, electronic communication appears to have increased it, probably because people swap more messages with those they have personal interaction with.
....
A lot of thinking about economics and numerous business plans are based on the idea that society has become a "small world." There may need to be some hurried rethinking if that premise turns out to be wrong.




And the second part of this rant is sparked by an over-simplified categorization of social media users found at AndersonAnalytics. I am glad that there are others interested in social analytics, and from a behavioral and psychological angle. This has been my bailiwick for a while now. I don't have research to support my "insights" into user psychologies. Anderson floats user types based on a simple form on which users self-describe themselves in ways that unsurprisingly match the characteristics used to differentiate users.

Others have taken this kind of approach, and while I have my doubts about the reliability of self-described behaviors (we don't always know the whys and wherefores of our actions), it's again not the research approach that bothers me. It's the idea that user types may be identified that explain user behavior and experience. This is suggested by the labels: "fun-seeker" (a form question supporting this must be: "Express my creativity", which is an awfully strange way to self-describe "have fun," not to mention that being creative and expressing oneself are different things altogether, that being creative doesn't require an audience, and boring people express themselves, too).

It bothers me when generalizations are made on the basis of data inadequate to the generalizations concluded (our first case, above) or on the basis of data poorly collected (our second case, below). Granted, research in this field is often cited to tell stories that support the cases made by social media professionals. But for those who might take such conclusions as we see here to heart, I want to simply say that online user experiences, and real phenomena of communication, of relationships, of community, etc, are far more complicated than suggested here. If you are in the business of using social media, demand better research and reporting.


From: Anderson Analytics’ Seven Social Network Segments

"To understand the SNS market more broadly, Anderson Analytics has created and profiled seven segments of online Americans. Three SNS Non-User segments and four SNS User segments. The yellow circles mapped below represent the four SNS User segments. The blue circles represent the three SNS Non-User segments."

The designer's influence: social media and the user experience

There's been an interesting conversation underway on IxDA about design and influence. The original post on Johnnyholland also has a few tasty comments. My own take on issue of whether or not designers should be concerned with the ethics of their ability to influence users is, simply, no. But from the perspective of social intraction design, the conversation of design and its influence on users takes an interesting turn. Here's some of what came up today. My comment is in response to Dave Malouf's comment. I thought this might be worth blogging. Is this a cheap way to put up a blog post or another example of email surfacing interesting exchanges? Yes.

For context, Dave's comment, which raises the interesting question of how influence in social media:
"Now, the real question in my mind is to discuss, theorize, etc. HOW to do influence. What about perception and cognition and emotion can we work? What cultural strategies are most effective.
i.e. in social networking design, and social collaboration design there are a ton of means of getting people to be more contributor oriented. This is designing to increase activity.
or in e-commerce models, how do we get more people to hit that final "submit"?
or in health care how do we get people to take better care of themselves, for clinicians to make less mistakes, etc.?" -- Dave Malouf

My response
Why are contributors contributing? Perhaps because they have a sense of the common good, and as motivates many wikipedians, they want to maintain accuracy and breadth of open-sourced knowledge. Or perhaps they're "contributing" to twitter because they've got an enormous ego and no sense of self restraint.

Clearly the term "contribute" loses its meaning very quickly when we get into social media, as nearly everything said or submitted is a contribution: social bookmarking, retweeting, blogging, commenting...

How does one "design" the social -- that's what interests me, and in particular, what kinds of social interactions, individual, interpersonal, social, and public, can be codified? What concepts do we need if we're to go from explaining a single user interaction on social media to the social dynamics of two or more users? Clearly the interactions are users with users, not users with software -- but we cant just use real world social interactions as our models. Mediation strips away face, body, and affect; it removes synchrony of time. Etc etc.. There's plenty more...

So the question of influence is a very good one. It's probably not an ethical one, because "we" don't control the user, his/her perceptions, interests, choices, motives, or his/her experience. Personally i think "framing" may be a viable way to approach the issue of designing the social, as it shifts emphasis from "design" to "perspective", and in social interaction design it's mostly about shaping these nuanced social meanings and negotiations, not functions (as with so much product design or interface design -- and that's not to denigrate style, etc).

The matter does seem v interesting if the question is explored not in terms of our responsibilities as designers but in terms of the user experience: what kinds of users choose to retweet an influencer? What kinds of social incentives work with non-competitive users? Are there ways to reduce the bias or distortion that leader boards often produce? Would there be a way to grow a service like twitter without it turning into a popularity contest for so many users? What social incentives do experts respond to, and could a system be designed to appeal to experts without attracting promoters?

As the motivation is often the other person, the matter of influencing the user does get interesting... Are there ethics involved if a dating site is designed to keep users hopeful, voyeuristically engaged, addicted to checking for new flirts and message, and highly unlikely to get a real date? Dunno, that's the business of dating sites, none of which would survive if they did what the claim to do.

We need to bear in mind that most social media, and perhaps a great deal of software in general, operate in failure mode much of the time. Twitter is not conversational. Followers are not friends. Facebook is not social. Many modern social systems are but a disaster waiting to happen. So how do we talk about influence and incentives if in fact much user activity fails to communicate,is ambiguous in its intent,is redundant with contributions elsewhere, goes un-responded to, is out of context...

If so much of social media interaction is actually handling of failure, responding to breakdown, bridging misunderstanding, and otherwise social "error handling," then perhaps we ought to learn more about what "functional social media" means before worrying that we have too much influence... And i'll say right now that these errors and failures may in fact be the motor of participation on social media: we're into breakdowns, ambiguities, ambivalence, conflict, and drama.

--Adrian

A conversation with Thomas Vander Wal

The following is a raw and unedited email exchange between myself and Thomas Vander Wal (@vanderwal), fellow social interaction designer and social software architect par excellance. Thomas and I have complementary perspectives on social media design and on the methods that best support emergent and managed social practices on social media. Our interest in the design challenge presented by social software and our inclination to new paradigms and concepts is shared. We take different perspectives on how to articulate social interaction models, and this short exchange sheds some unfiltered light on those differences. We thought it would be a pity to lose this email exchange to the dustbin of backchannel history.

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On Jul 21, 2009, at 8:59 AM, Thomas Vander Wal wrote:

The conversations models & how they map to the difference faces & steps in the communication progression from personal, collective, community/group, and collaborative have interest to me. Each are different design problems with very different interaction & communication needs, hence leading to different conversation models.

Personal: Focussed on holding on to objects (including people & relationships) and annotating for refinding and aggregating as needed.

Collective: Open sharing/stating around objects (with various possibilities around level of sociality) with some conversation directly with them in comments, but also indirect conversations (friendfeed, microsharing, etc.)

Community/Group: Fully aware of others with interests around the object and interacting with the others in a manner that is open to others in the community/group.

Collaborative: Goal is getting down to one view and one product. This requires the means to identify and work through conflicting concepts and understanding. Requires working together and identifying, addressing, and working through conflict to come to one resolutions (there can not be more then one personal day policy in an organization).

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On Jul 21, 2009, at 12:25 PM, adrian chan wrote:

these are cats used by ross, clay and others that i'm not totally aligned with. primarily because I dont think they reflect anthropological or sociological distinctions in interaction systems or situations. (e.g. paired interactions, triangulated interactions, group membership, inter-group interaction, alliance, family, tribe, community, or now the social media-specific formations which seem to be "invisible audiences," "publics" or "audiences" depending on who you talk to.)

for example i dont think "collective" is a natural social phenomenon but if it occurs is a byproduct or outcome of carefully structured interactions in which personal social dimensions are minimized to reduce the bias of status, rank, hierarchy and other attention-getting behaviors. Which is why Hunch.com has shirky written all over it, or why we all use wikipedia as our reference standard for collective action!

in other words,
a structuralist would tell us that these categories dont exist.

a sociologist would say that forms of communication and social practices transcend these categories and may be found in the reproduction in any of these categories, so cant be the causal explanation for how these categories of content production are realized.

a psychologist would say that user motives are not a reflection of a kind of social arrangement, that for example interpersonal stuff, attractions and flirting, lurking etc can all occur in social groups of different sizes and structure

a social media theorist might say that it matters more how people see others, see themselves, and think they see how they are seen by othres, and that the constraints on action in and results out are what govern behavior -- but that users wont have "collective" or "collaboration" etc in mind when they're acting -- that user centric view will prevail over an architectural one

i think where shirky has a blindspot is in motives -- he's a good pattern recognizer but patterns can be effects without being causes, or without being the goal or the motive of a certain user's activity.

where shirky sees structure as a way of possibly eliminating social distortions, i still think it's essential to know how the user sees himself in the social field to know where bias may be introduced.

and in today's highly conversational mediaverse, these structures are hard to map to aggregation, disaggregation, and other twitter/status feed phenomena. twitter and its kin are so fluid, so ephemeral and time-based, that it's hard to grasp the causes of social outcomes without using communication theory and interaction dynamics (which i sloppily call "conversation models"). challenge being that one has to capture what interests a user -- could be their own status, could be their reputation, their commitment to a higher goal, their need for attention, etc, all of which come out in conversation but none of which are governed by structural arrangements (like collab, collective, or community)....

in short the question you raise is: does the social order account for user behavior? Is the social order the user's orientation. I dont think it is, but that would be my bone to pick with ross or shirky (some day....)

what do you think? am i making sense?

a

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On Jul 21, 2009, at 9:52 AM, Thomas Vander Wal wrote:

Your approach makes sense and fits wonderfully within social comfort. One of the things I have found working with organizations on the inside is the assumptions from the outside (open web tools) are broken. Adoption of the same patterns outside don't happen inside organizations, as the measures are vastly different (outside pure numbers (100k to millions of users) and inside is percentage of employees/customers). Our assumed understanding for tools and models from web 2.0 don't really work well when dealing with closed populations. What we realize is these tools are less than optimal on the web too. This was my huge problem in writing my book (Understanding Folksonomy) for O'Reilly, I could not explain value that was derived nor could I explain things that were broken.

Conversation models fit nicely in social comfort, which I currently have set within the elements of social software and build order. Unless the prior elements are met, there is no communication/conversation. The realm of social is far more complex and runs on many different planes and models at once. There is no pure model, but a mixture of models and understandings.

The elements of social software and social comfort are important in all of the faces of perception (where personal, collective, community, collaboration, newbie, system owner, and external developer) come into play as task roles. But, seen from the perspective of a cube or other polygon, we can see many sides at once and are participants in the various tasks and faces.

I agree and disagree with "but that users wont have "collective" or "collaboration" etc in mind when they're acting" as I see the mindset of whom am I sharing with (how broadly) and goals (stated or inferred) with the task type, when users are interacting with others on internal social tools. But, it is not the user's perspective that is at the forefront as much as it is having the proper tools with the proper elements to achieve each type of task. Most organizations do not think of the progression of tasks and ensure their tools embrace the needs at the various stages. Often true collaboration elements are missing as well as desperately needed tools for personal tasks.

The Inmates Have Requested Asylum

I spent much of yesterday afternoon listening to podcasts from a conference I wish I had attended: the IA Summit. The podcasts are up on Boxes and Arrows (thank you Chris Baum!) and are well worth a listen. I also found that they looked good in iTunes with the visualizer turned on.

I don't know that I'm an information architect. I was a web developer for seven years but eschewed acronymic attributions on principle and felt that most of us were making it up as we were going along. The design agencies that billed for process and methodology took the designations most seriously, it seemed, and had the design talent that gave them the right to do so. After the dotcom crash many of those methodologies were shelved, as budgets for web work drew the line item for process out of the picture. The industry was commodifying, rates tumbled, and there were few compelling development projects available to small agencies. For a while many of us developers were working like architects being asked only to paint the exterior of a house. The real building contracts were fewer and farther between.

Then the social web began taking shape, and things got interesting again. I removed my entire web portfolio from my site and hunkered down to think about social software. Fascinated as i have always been with social interaction and communication -- in theory and practice -- it seemed to me that new opportunities would emerge for what I started to call "social interaction design" (SxD). I was not so allergic to labels after all -- as long as they were my own. And i pretty much kept to myself, doing startup work and thinking about a conceptual framework for mediated social interactions.

Listening to IA pods yesterday got me thinking about where we now stand. IA, IxD, UX, separately or together is not so important -- the institutional taxonomy and territorial distinctions being beside the point. For I have yet to see an IA drive a social media design or experience. Yet to see an interaction designer lead the team. Yet to see a user experience lead define what a social media application will do or how it will work. From my limited experience in Web 2.0, engineering drives features, marketing drives branding, bizdev drives platform interoperability and open-ness, and web design drives UI, navigation, information architecture. A coffee house, co-working space, or apartment serves as the shop or studio. And process is determined as much by whatever everyone else is doing and launching as it is by internal startup dynamics.

There is no high-level design methodology for social interaction or social media development. IA, IxD, and UX are regarded as a luxury, considered an unnecessary use of funds, and are largely irrelevant and out of the picture. How is it that the very field that should be in front of social media trails it so badly? Why is it that we are still trying to define a tidy set of concepts, for identity, presence, privacy, messaging or what have you, while "web 2.0" startups are out there making this stuff up as they go? Why, failing the means by which to understand social interactions well enough to anticipate them ahead of time, are we cooking up dishes to throw them at the wall in order to see what sticks? Is agile a design process, or another way of saying "we don't know what will happen?" Do we not know what will happen because that's how social media works, or because we don't know how to look at it?

I don't have answers for these questions, but I have suspicions. I do think that design organizes and shapes the user experience. i do think that user experiences, together, produce social practices. I do think those social practices are consistent -- with the designs that facilitate them as well as with the social themes and activities by which we all "know what we're doing" and "what's going on," socially. Something has been built, that something is constrains and enables, and decisions have been made. But our field, the design of social media, is lacking the language and framework by which to conceptually grasp and reasonably anticipate (if not predict) design outcomes. In their absence, it is funders, technologists, marketers (all due respect, but they have their interests and competencies and they are often not user-centric in nature) and visual designers who are making the decisions that shape what a product is, how it (is supposed to) works, by whom it is enjoyed, and what their enjoyment will leave behind. And in the absence of clear thinking and an understanding of mediated social practices, our next best option is to rely on best practices -- which, we know, do not travel well and are frequently lost in translation. (All social media do not need twitter.)

it's nigh on the hour that we begin to furnish the industry, and ourselves, with a solid set of concepts for the "design" of social interactions. They can be obtained and drawn from insightful and principled works in sociology, psychology, linguistics, communication theory, and symbolic interaction. For the inmates have requested asylum. They're not in the asylum. We've misunderstood the very word "asylum." it's not a place that "they" are, but something they want. Design of social media is not containers and spaces, is not identities, mug shots, and IDs. Presence is not roll call and privacy is not just control. People are the content, they're not the contents. I get the sense that in our predilection for design and our visual-mindedness, we have become too comfortable with spatial architectures and confining spaces. That in our emphasis on the user we have forgotten her experience. We treat users as objects, put them in little boxes, and watch them from the panopticon that has been at the center of any post-industrial prison since the idea of control regimes was first thought up.

Design of social media is not a visual problem, as design should not be a method of control. Design should refer to how we think about social media and social interactions -- not something we do in order to design the user's experience. Design should, in this case, be our discipline and conceptual practices. Design should be what we create in order to anticipate individual and social experiences and interactions -- with all of their contingent, dependent, and temporal dynamics intact.

Joshua Porter mentioned, in one of the podcasts, the case of corporate plazas. This oft-cited tale tells of how corporations failed to realize that in their aesthetic self-aggrandizement, they had built plazas and lobbies for themselves that looked good but were barren and bereft of life. William H Whyte, a must-read for anyone doing social, was one of the pioneering researchers to reclaim public spaces for public use and consumption. He proved that we like, and in fact want to be in the midst of, streams of social activity and noise. But he also demonstrated that it was not design, but humans, who negotiate and determine the flow of activity. Subway users in Tokyo, he discovered, could get through a revolving door and to a train in numbers and rates of flow exceeding the theoretical design limits of the door itself.

I worry that unless we catch up quickly, social media will continue down self-reinforcing, and thus increasingly un-imaginitive, cycles of best practices. That we will be left to design corporate plazas. And that we will do so with a taste for the neat and tidy that is our preference as practitioners, but which will only result in lifeless and unsatisfying boxes, and, well, arrows. Imprisoned in the structured containers of thought of our own making. While the inmates, having long left the building, scratch their heads in the yard.


There is so much to learn by thinking outside the box.

Opportunities for interaction around Twitter

What would an F8 application space built around twitter look like? This thought occurred to me as I was pondering twitter this morning. Twitter is still all the talk in social media circles, and the company's recent acquisition of Douglas Bowman (recently ex-Google) suggests that it may have more up its sleeves yet in the way of user experience enhancements.

I'm most intrigued by the notion that in a social space like twitter, which is fundamentally open, might accommodate structure and organization on-the-fly. Twitter's lack of social organization stands in contrast to the contained and persistent presence and relationship structure of Facebook. Facebook not only guarantees a higher level of attention and visibility around user actions, its super social activity-oriented architecture and design allow the company to offer developers templates for social interaction, a means of distribution among friends, and feeds by which to publish activity and participation.

Twitter, on the other hand, is built around asymmetrical, often un-reciprocated member relationships. it's activity stream is organized only by time, not by space or application as it is on Facebook. It has virtually no symbolic languages or gestural systems, and few means of routing and addressing communication, not to mention differentiating it aside from what the user says.

Where Facebook has raised the bar for social actions, Twitter remains primarily a communication space. But in the real world, a great variety of forms of talk exist to organize social relationships and various "kinds of doing" (as Goffman would put it). These have been categorized by sociologists as rituals, ceremonies, pastimes, games, and intimacies. They rely more heavily on unwritten but tacitly understood codes of conduct and behavior. But like social action systems, they involve sequencing, turns, addresing, the distribution of attention, and constraints on behavior as well as speech.

So, could talk-based social action systems be in twitter's future? We've seen hints of this already. Indeed it seems almost inevitable that an open system for talk like twitter would show signs of self-organization, and the emergence of social practices having more structure than the ubiquitous baseline tweet. We would need only twitter apps and services that mine relationships, connect the unconnected, and introduce topical or other kinds of speech-based forms to organize and order activity and participation. On twitter, these might be on the structures designed to work on-the-fly, or to persist over time.

Here's a quick look at how we might approach the field.

The design of social interactions around twitter presents some interesting challenges. We can bundle these into conceptual categories that pertain to the design of openly-structured social media in particular.

• Social organization: organizes participants, defines roles, positions, rank, results, and so on
• Activities: organizes the tweet-based activities, both communication and action based
• Meta: presentation layer for activities, using tweets, twitterers, relationships, data, and content as source material

Social organization

Relationships on twitter can be established without mutual consent (I follow you, you don't follow me back). This means that many are asymmetrical. Asymmetry probably increases the incidence of transient relationships (I follow you for a while, unless you follow me back). Higher transience corresponds to a lower commitment barrier, which might enable passing and temporary relationships with others for reasons other than friendship and genuine personal interest.

This suggests that in theory at least, a relationship could be used temporarily for social organization or activity structure (say, for the duration of a game).

Associative and informal relationships can be suggested by mentioning a person in a tweet. This suggests that passing and temporary relationships of affiliation or association could be used for social organization (say, to create a team).

Groups and audiences. Followers of a twitter @username or those associated with hashtags (categories; see what wefollow is doing) could serve the purposes of transient or temporary social activities. Again, fans and teams come to mind.



Activities

Conversational/Communication-based activities would require users to include terms or phrases required to further a game or social interaction. The possibilities here are endless, from the poetic to the informational, quantitative, descriptive, instructional, normative, and much more. Games or activities could be built around "speech acts" that do or accomplish something, trigger, launch, start, iterate, repeat, or close a run of action, a series of moves, even an operation. (Many ceremonies are carried out by means of following a script.)

Social Action based activities would require not only the saying of things but saying them in order, or addressed to particular "players." The distinction between communication and social action is that the tweet would just be a "move." Tweeting would perform the move. A game would might use a code or set of rules that is played by tweeting. One could play chess quite easily using twitter. Rules of interaction could be designed around the moves, responses to moves, sequencing of moves, who moves, and so on. Again, the possibilities are endless.



Meta

Visualizations could be used to show what is happening across those playing or participating in a twitter-based social game. Tweets might be represented as they are. Or their authors might be represented. They may be shown by attributes, location, historically relevant information, by relation, activity, and so on. Or tweets might be used to control a visualization (much as font sizes are coupled to volume in tag clouds). Real time games could even be played around twitter real-time search results. Data mined from tweets, twitter users, and relationships could be used to bind or constrain games and to design rules of play.

Trends would be very easy to make interactive on twitter, as the timeline is fast participation is easy. Real-time polls and trending lend themselves to twitter. Visualizations could be added to capture results, and also to create interaction systems and controllers. Tweets might be used to create content that is then re-purposed for social gaming. Just think of the many quiz shows, trivia games, and real-time polls that are common on tv and in some online social games...


These are just ideas for how twitter could be used for more structured and organized activities. I thought it might be fun to voice some of this o flesh out the ideas and to delineate some of the structure that is implicit in twitter and in talk in general. I can see these happening, although it's possible that twitter's strong sense of public space will act as a constraint. But it wouldn't surprise me if some brand, some time, creates a hit.

Tell me, please

In client work recently I have come up against the the importance -- and difficulty -- of satisfying multiple user positions and experiences. Social media work because the author and the reader are satisfied. Sure, social MEdia need to be satisfying to me, but if they are to scale and succeed, the social system needs to reward readers and recipients, too.

This has brought up a few interesting principles of late. I want to share them just because I find them interesting.

The first is that there's an asymmetry between the interest which motivates the user who "acts" (creates, posts, etc) and the user who responds. Not all systems are built around a coupled statement-response model of communication, of course.

But there's an intrinsic interest in response for a lot of users and use cases in twitter and other conversational tools. If I ask a question on twitter, I am motivated by my question, which is something I want an answer to now. The person who is asked (who sees) the question has no interest at all. His or her interest can be piqued and aroused -- but is not the same as mine.

The act of answering may more likely be the motivation, and not the content of the question. Question and answer systems are difficult because they involve satisfying two users, the asker and the answerer. If these user experiences are satisfied in real-time, then the interaction itself handles the experience. If they are satisfied out of synch, then each user has to produce his/her own interest: one in the act of asking, one in the act of answering.

This asymmetry extends to other aspects of communication in social media. Take, for example the case of sharing.

Because users are different, and have different personalities:

• Some who share do so because they want to share with (someone).
  
• Others share because they want to show to (others).
  
• Some share to exchange for (something).
  

These are different experiences and are met with different technologies or have different technical solutions.

For example, the user who shares with someone probably posts the photo in order to send it along. Sharing is the act; The photo is the symbol. This user wouldn't post this particular photo if it weren't for the person or people s/he was thinking of.

But take a person who finds something online, and book marks it because it is interesting, but has no person in mind to share it with. Later, this person decides either that the thing is interesting enough that others would find it interesting, and shares it. Or s/he thinks of a person who might enjoy it also, and shares it. Sharing in this case has come afterwards. It is a second act, it adds value to this person's user experience, but wasn't the original motive or interest.

The user in our first case, on the other hand, wanted to communicate from the beginning. Communicating was the primary act, and was the motive and interest.

These are just two simple examples of how the activity involved in sharing stuff online can be broken down into two acts: one of saving the thing; one of sharing the thing. And that these are different, depending on whether they are governed by the act of saving or the act of communicating.

In the first case the action carries the content. Communication leads.
in the second the content precedes the act. Communication follows.

These distinctions may seem trivial but they're not. They have significant implications for:

• how the system scales
  
• who finds it useful (and who finds it a waste of time)
  
• what content is produced as a leave behind
  
• how personal or public it is in tone
  
• how easily it can be organized and structured, and so on

Social problems can have only social solutions.


Note: This blog post belongs to a series on "status culture." The posts examine status updates, facebook activity feeds, news feeds, twitter, microblogging, lifestreaming, and other social media applications and features belonging to conversation media. My approach will be user-centric as always, and tackle usability and social experience issues (human factors, interaction design, interface design) at the heart of social interaction design. But we will also use anthropology, sociology, psychology, communication and media theories. Perhaps even some film theory.
The converational trend in social networking sites and applications suggests that web 2.0 is rapidly developing into a social web that embraces talk (post IM, chat, and email) in front of new kinds of publics and peer groups. User generated content supplied to search engines is increasingly produced conversationally. Social media analytics tools provide PR and social media marketing with means to track and monitor conversations. Brands are interested in joining the conversation feeds, through influencers as well as their own twitter presence.
This changing landscape not only raises interesting issues for developers and applications (such as the many twitter third party apps), but for social practices emerging around them. So we will look also at design principles for conversation-based apps, cultural and social trends, marketing trends, and other examples of new forms of talk online.
These blog posts will vary in tenor, from quick reflections on experiences to more in-depth approaches to design methodology for conversational social media.

Social media's first law: user centric design

The first law of social interaction design is the law of user centric design. The user centricity of social media is obvious. Social media are voluntary, and they mean to their users what their users put in and take out of them. Users are interested users, not needy or obliged users. Even users who can claim to have goals and objectives are motivated to participate, contribute, even just read and lurk, because they want to. Compelling social media do not compel users -- users become compelled, for whatever short or long-term interest it is that compels them.

That said, we recognize that social media are highly psychological. The reasons that motivate any given user may be rational, or not, may be task or goal-oriented, or may be a reflection of distraction, compulsion, or even "addiction." The fact that social media use involves psychological interests has a couple implications for designers, builders, and users. First, it means that we cannot know the reasons for a user's use, or by extension, the reasons that an application is used. Second, we cannot even assume that a user knows those reasons. I like to say that to know what a social media application does, turn it off. We will soon know why and how we use an application by what we miss.

This leads us to a corollary of the first law: the value of social media is specific to the user. Ask any user why he or she uses it and you will get an answer specific to that individual. Reasons for use are not generic, and are not generalizable. The social media application is individuated by its users -- that is, it accrues uses and reasons for use as it accrues users. Furthermore, ask any user what he or she uses it for, and you will get uses specific to that user. The value of social media is a combination of how a user uses it, and what reasons s/he can provide for using it. Value is in the eyes of the beholder. It is subjective, individual, and non-generalizable. We cannot ascribe one value to a social media application, and should approach any claims about an application's value with caution. (They are likely to reflect the value perceived by that person, given the context and interests of his or her use of it.)

A second corollary obtains from the first law: users use social media based on existing and past experiences with other media. Users do not invent uses for social media wholesale, but rather use new applications to extend their current habits and uses of other media. A user who chats will likely use Twitter differently from a user who blogs. A user who uses IM will likely use Twitter differently than a user who is a Facebook addict. And so on. Research is not required to prove the claim that we blog, update, comment, post, upload, review, rate, recommend, IM, chat, email, and tweet very differently. I'm not likely to suddenly start commenting in all caps on Youtube tomorrow, any more than a heavy chatter is to suddenly switch to Twitter for conversation. Each of us is a bundle of habits and repetitions. And we use social media according to how we can each see them fitting into what we tend to do.

A third corollary follows, and it is that we cannot know what the user is doing and experiencing. The web as biased in favor of the affirmative, meaning, it captures action but not inaction. Clicks are recorded, but not reading. We know only when a user does something, and that something is captured as an affirmation. There are no "contradictory" or "negative" acts counted online. An act of opposition would look the same to the web server as a an act of affirmation. All actions are, in communication theory terms, a "yes." The inability to know what user's experience confounds all media, but it is complicated online by the fact that we can track and measure some things. And we focus mightily on them. In the case of Twitter and in the culture of status updating, however, we have no means by which to know what and how much is being read. It takes a retweet, a comment, or a reply to publicize and manifest the reader's attention to a message. This is, of course, why we count our followers. Their number is a substitute for attention and visibility, meaning relevance and acknowledgment. Each and every tweet solicits a response, and in its loneliness is one of the small moments of irrelevance we suffer through daily in our contract with social media. There is no way of showing others that we are paying attention without making it obvious -- by saying so.

A fourth corollary follows, and we have suggested it already: to show that s/he is paying attention, the user must act. Communication is not just the performance of a statement; that would just be expression. Communication occurs when that statement is accepted or rejected. This "yes or no" response is what transforms expression into communication, what makes of it an action system. Designers know of actions. But in communication, the action is on either the message or its author. It is this possibility, that we can respond to what is said or to who said it, that implicates relationships in social media. And the ambiguity of which was intended that can often subsist in social media use fuels the engine for further participation.


Social media professionals can do no better than to keep the first law in mind. And to bear in mind, also, that users are different. For designers, this should mean occasionally forgoing standards or conventions for something else. Tools designed for writing and publishing online, for example, need not be the basis for fast messaging and lifestreaming. Page layouts common to text-oriented applications will miss out on users who watch and see (some desktop Twitter apps now emphasize visualizing the stream of users over and instead of their posts). For marketers, it is unlikely that top influencers are the ones to reach on Twitter -- other kinds of users are more motivated to retweet and promote. And for inventors, solving some of the big problems, such as awareness and attention, or addressing use cases that involve under-served user types, can offer compelling opportunities.

The law of user centricity tells us that we cannot know what we might do, nor can we know what can be done. But that in all cases we should ask, what is it capable of? We will address this in the second law.


Social media's second law: it's a verb, not a noun

Social media's third law: designing for communication



Note: This blog post belongs to a series on "status culture." The posts examine status updates, facebook activity feeds, news feeds, twitter, microblogging, lifestreaming, and other social media applications and features belonging to conversation media. My approach will be user-centric as always, and tackle usability and social experience issues (human factors, interaction design, interface design) at the heart of social interaction design. But we will also use anthropology, sociology, psychology, communication and media theories. Perhaps even some film theory.
The converational trend in social networking sites and applications suggests that web 2.0 is rapidly developing into a social web that embraces talk (post IM, chat, and email) in front of new kinds of publics and peer groups. User generated content supplied to search engines is increasingly produced conversationally. Social media analytics tools provide PR and social media marketing with means to track and monitor conversations. Brands are interested in joining the conversation feeds, through influencers as well as their own twitter presence.
This changing landscape not only raises interesting issues for developers and applications (such as the many twitter third party apps), but for social practices emerging around them. So we will look also at design principles for conversation-based apps, cultural and social trends, marketing trends, and other examples of new forms of talk online.
These blog posts will vary in tenor, from quick reflections on experiences to more in-depth approaches to design methodology for conversational social media.

Social Media Personality Types: Slideshow

This slideshow has been laying about for too many months now so I've decided to wrap it quickly and push it out there. It's a distillation of a much larger project I've been pursuing and which I hope to write up and post as a white paper this winter.

Having covered the screen and functionality of social media from a social interaction design perspective, the next piece in the puzzle had to be the social media user experience. These personality types are an attempt to distill out just some of the different user experiences had on social media into personality types..

The idea behind this slideshow was to make the claim that we must all have very different experiences of social media: in our sense of connectedness, visibility, popularity, in what we think it is for and why we use it. These differences ought to matter not only to any user experience or interaction designer, but to any business interested in commercializing or profiting from social media.

It has always seemed to me that the conventional market segmentation of user types (influencers etc.), while perhaps identifying broad categories of users, fails to account for the user experience. Surely, influencers do not relate to social media as influencers; followers as followers; and so on... These definitions aren't grounded in a framework of motive or intention, and therefore fall short of explaining behavior based on the user's competency as a social media participant.

This slideshow attempts to sketch a view of users based on personality differences that takes mediated communication and interaction into account (I don't know of any personality models that have been customized to non face to face interactions). This means adapting personality types for the unique ways in which social media represent us to ourselves, represent others, present and facilitated social activities, and so on. It means taking personality types and anticipating what, in social media, would engage them, motivate them, and compel them. As a sketch, it is incomplete and intended to kick off discussion.

Social Media Personality Types

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: social media)

Post Writing: Social Self, Private Self, Post(ing) Self

The lights went down at the Fillmore and with a roar a reconfigured Smashing Pumpkins lit up their instruments. The crowd moved forward and you could feel the place slot into full-on sound and fury. I was one among friends, gutless pride at having scored an extra ticket, and lost in the crush that any honest concert goer yearns for on occasion: lust for a total experience.

And there I was -- only one of many to hold up a camera and shoot a brief bit of video, when the lights went green, like neon rails, oscillating to a beating wall of sound. Around me, phones came out of pockets and were held aloft, too many for security to have done anything about. It had become OK to take a memento. We got ours, LoFi.

This was just over a year ago. It took that long for the music industry to realize the free marketing power its brands (bands) enjoy from the posted concert videos and pictures that are such a cultural staple on Youtube. But this post is not about marketing -- it's about the experience. That night, doing that, I felt there was something "elsehwere" about seeing all those cameras and phones dancing over heads and straining for an angle on the show.

There was this strange blurring of here and there, or here and elsewhere, that all those phones seemed to suggest, and which in many ways stained the purity of being there. Akin, in feeling at least, to watching overzealous tourists snapping away at an art museum without so much as absorbing the real thing while standing there in its presence and singularity. Something that suggested the ambivalence I have personally felt, nearly always, about bringing along a camera to important social rituals -- and to nature especially -- fearing that I might not manage the negotiation from observing to being there.

The slippage between being there and not being there seems real to me. Not only does taking a video at a concert involve a small number of technical hurdles, and the matter of paying attention to the camera long enough to miss some of the show. There is also the mental shift of considering the person, or site, audience, etc. that we do it for. Recording for the purpose of sharing always involves "for whom is it done," even when this is nobody in particular. And this step in the recording or capturing of a live event seems at a step removed from being in it.

This "being here" and "being there" comes up in other cases, I've noticed, where a mediating technology is involved. I've watched panhandlers approach friends hanging/smoking outside a bar, and deliberately choose to interrupt the ones engaged in conversation instead of the person on the phone. Interesting, and even counter-intuitive, it seemed to me. Until you realize that the panhandler can negotiate the interruption with two people who are co-present better than with only one person (the other being at the other end of the phone).

Being here and being there, or the slippage between private and social, comes up in social media all the time. Twitter is a great example of a tool used to post in front of "everyone." Inspired in part by Facebook's status feeds, Twitter allows users to post to a greater audience. Unlike the member's audience on Facebook, which is most often his or her friends, audiences on Twitter are a mix of friends, colleagues, acquaintances, and other unknown followers. (UFOs: Unknown Following Others. ?!!)

The kind of audience we find ourselves in informs and shapes our behavior. When the context of interaction is mediated, however, we are bound by the kind of audience that we imagine, expect, or believe. When we tweet, we have a notion of who's reading us, whether we believe that it's just one person or a lot more than one person, and whether we believe others are online now, paying attention, or not. Any medium that puts us in front of a "virtual" audience must have a way of presenting that audience back to us. (This is another reason that lifestreaming applications present content, which is messages from people, in a stream or flow, rather than on a page.)

And there, in the gap between the act of posting and the post itself, there seems to me to be a gap of presence. A juxtaposition of here and now, and there and elsewhere, that coincides with the act of youtubing a concert live. Why do we do it (use social media), and for whom, if and when the medium is built on a radical uncertainty of presence: a gap composed of parts discontinuity, distraction, and disconnection?

Answering this question seems imperative if we are to grasp the root motivation behind participating in social media. For we all recognize that in all things social media, presence, attention, intention, and connection frame the medium's usage as well as its application and extension across markets and industries. Social media produce presence and as such are means of producing the Self.

This line of reflection came back somewhat jarringly while I was reading the compelling article on the late and magnificent author David Foster Wallace. DFW had suffered depression most of his adult life, and it manifested in a kind of writing that he used to quiet his self doubts and profound lack of a sense of true self. Occupying an other's voice, getting under their skin, writing through them, was for him a way of occupying a Self.

"He once said to me that he wanted to write to shut up the babble in his head. He said when you're writing well, you establish a voice in your head, and it shuts up the other voices. The ones that are saying 'You're not good enough, you're a fraud.'" -- Rolling Stone

This navigation between a genuine and true Self, and a false, inauthentic Self, limns the article. To Wallace, this was not only a depressive symptom, it was a matter of writing itself. Writing for and in front of an audience is a production of the Self -- but one experienced very differently by the author than by his audience. In his own words, Wallace described the gap:

"There is, in writing, a certain blend of sincerity and manipulation, of trying always to gauge what the particular effect of something is gonna be," he said. "It's a very precious asset that really needs to be turned off sometimes. My guess is that writers probably make fun, skilled, satisfactory, and seemingly considerate partners for other people. But that the experience for them is often rather lonely."

And as the Rolling Stone author David Lipsky observed, Wallace's inner experience of Self not only inspired his best work (as when he made his characters his own), but may have also manifested a profound dislocation of being himself.

"In a way, the difference between fiction and the nonfiction reads as the difference between Wallace's social self and his private self. The essays were endlessly charming, they were the best friend you'd ever have, spotting everything, whispering jokes, sweeping you past what was irritating or boring or awful in humane style. Wallace's fiction, especially after Infinite Jest, would turn chilly, dark, abstract."

(From Rolling Stone, October 30, 2008. See also: Getting to Know David Foster Wallace)

This resonated for me, as I can often feel a shift in my own relation to social media, as if they are sometimes near, sometimes far. I am sometimes more aware of my inner experience, sometimes more aware of the audience. Sometimes more aware of what it is I want to say, and of how to say it; and sometimes more aware of how it might go over, what effect it may have. These seemed to be the way in which David Foster Wallace wrote his way through life. Being comfortable with the switch, with being here vs being there, was not a problem DFW experienced online -- it was a problem he experience in daily life. Again, DFW:

"For instance, if I'm hanging out with you, I can't even tell whether I like you or not because I'm too worried a out whether you like me."

I can't imagine how difficult the days must have been for Wallace. A fan for years, I hadn't known that his writing was in some ways symptomatic, if not pathological. That he needed to write in order to produce Self, and that a fictional Self was at least better than a doubt-ridden Self.

Coming back then to social media, and of the juxtaposition of two modes of presence that they sometimes engender (here/there), I wondered whether or not our relation to the medium might in itself create the types of conditions that Wallace experienced most acutely. Granted, the subtext to the "follow you, follow me" phenomenon is a simple and basic condition (it would seem) of the human experience: validation, acknowledgment, recognition. We all need it, as much if not more than food or any other kind of sustenance.

But getting it is a matter of interacting with others, and this raises the contingency of experiencing oneself while being in the world, with others. We wish to be with, not next to, one another (IMHO). I have often believed that any mediation of communication and interaction disables and hobbles this process. Here is one of my favorite sources, the sociologist Erving Goffman, on the matter:

"These two tendencies, that of the speaker to scale down his expressions and that of the listeners to scale up their interests, each in the light of the other's capacities and demands, form the bridge that people build to one another, allowing them to meet for a moment of talk in a communion of reciprocally sustained involvement. It is this spark, not the more obvious kinds of love, that lights up the world." Erving Goffman

Which gets us back to technologies like Twitter and the cameras out at the Pumpkins concert, which certainly did light things up. Is there in writing, and in mediated writing, a doubling up of the Self experience, along the lines described by Wallace? A kind of "You're Ok, How am I?" (which is an old Transactional Analyst's joke) that comes packaged perhaps in "I'm Ok, How are You?" A sort of linguistic doubling of the exchange, required to compensate for the obvious fact that one is not with the other -- one is not able to look the other in the eye, and scale interests up or down to create a shared stretch of time and mutually shared experience. That when there is a gap between the production of self, say in posting to social media, we anticipate the effects of our contributions while authoring them? That the doubling up of private self (the self that experiences participation) and social self (the self that sees itself seen in social media) might always result in ambiguity?

And that, unable to engage in "sustained involvement" with one another, we supply as much of the meaning as we can by using the writing, the speaking, the posting, sharing, and other contents of posted participation as possible. For the media are so thin on the ritual, ceremonial, and contextual aspects of the interaction that we can't use the normal social scaffolding of face to face interactions to prop up the encounter. The result being that in participating on social media, we over-invest in expression, and under-invest in reciprocation. Thus lending a bias to all mediated interaction in favor of unilateral experiences: a social, in other words, that's not very social.

I think that, at the end of the day, social media trade in the ambiguity of human relationships and communication. Failing to close the loop on proximity, they offer a nearness that is still disconnected, or to quote the title of the Wim Wenders film, "Faraway, So Close." And it is this unresolved ambiguity that underlies our motives and behavior on social media. We might close the loop now and then when a conversational turn or run develops, on Twitter or in commenting for example, but we still pump the space with a high level of communicative redundancy (posting overwhelms reading). We want to know the effect of our participation and this condition of the user experience is reflected in our use practices.

Media transform experience, and while they amplify and extend some of our abilities, they bracket and constrain others. As we increasingly adopt social media as means of being social, whether to author, share, engage, search, or consume each other's contributions, it does those of us who make and trade in social media well to understand that a medium is used as much for what it does not do as for what it does do.

Social media dis-embed the experience of being in a social encounter from the fact of being in a social encounter: they represent and manufacture a semblance of social context on the basis of dislocated presence. This is what grounds the individual user experience, from which social practices emerge as new forms of mediated interactions. These are not media of information to be searched and browsed, but of communication and presence sensed and solicited: to wit, the power of absence and the possibility of ambiguity.

When I think now about where this began, with the matter of being here and being there, and of a private self and a social self, the doubling of experience might be summed up neatly, in a double entendre. For the question of motive can be captured, indeed, with the words: "for whom is it done."




Related:
Games People Play post
Reading notes on Transactional Analysis and Social Media
Social media: Social Approximity?