/Message

A Social Interaction Design Primer

Current business conditions are unforgiving, and seem to be taking their toll on the social media industry, whether it's in the mood on Sand Hill, in the decline of online advertising, or even in the prognosis for Web 2.0 at large. I penned a reflective piece yesterday in which I suggested that companies in this space do more to enhance the user experience, or suffer through the coming Darwinian fight for survival. While execs work to define their business models, I'd like to attempt to capture the basics of social media user experience. For the business all of us are in, at the end of the day, hangs on the participation of users.

Years ago Alan Cooper published a book that has become a classic among designers. Titled Inmates Are Running The Asylum, it set a framework for interaction design based on respecting the user and her needs, goals, and objectives. User-centric design is now the de facto approach taken by software, product, interaction, and all manner of designers, including social media designers. In fact our industry, perhaps more than any other, relies on delivering compelling user experiences for its success. Users are our business model, and failure to engage users not only kills participation, but all other aspects of a social media company's business also.

As a self-proclaimed social media expert, I'm often asked by companies how to "get users to do" more of this or less of that. Clients understandably identify with their product, and with what they designed it for. But in social media, users do what they think a site or service is for, and not necessarily what it's designers intended. So I begin an engagement by asking clients to view their product from the user's perspective. Many small companies do not have a user experience designer on staff, and rely heavily on best practices to steer feature and interface design.

But user experience matters in social media are more complicated than in non-social software. For example, the conventional user-centric view starts with user needs and goals. In social media these are not necessarily rational and objective. They can be much more psychological, and social, for example. Furthermore, the interactions that users have are not just with the software application -- they are with other users (through the software). The UI is not an interface to discrete actions and transactions (such as your online banking site); it is a social interface, and through it users feel like they are interacting with friends and audiences.

This complicates matters somewhat for the standard interaction design approach. If the task of conventional software is to provide successful interactions, to inform the user that his actions worked, then what of social media? Communication is by definition an open-ended transaction, not a discrete one. Take the example of a dating site: one user pings another, by messaging or gesture, and hopes to hear back. Does the software designer want to provide a status message about the recipient's interest? "Your message was received but she's thinking about it. Please be patient."? Likely not. In fact, the dating site wants to keep its users on the hook for as long as possible. Ambiguity is in its interest -- not clarity and transparency.

We can go one further in distinguishing social interaction design (as I call it, or SxD) from standard user experience and interaction design. For in social software, failure works. Take twitter for example, which is not used for SMS-Web messaging as originally intended, and which hooks many users because in social communication and interaction terms, it is kind of upside-down and in reverse. Users don't choose who they are talking to. When they post, their tweet appears in "thread" that is a false representation because their post appears next to the tweets of those they follow, not those who follow them. And there is an asymmetry between posting and reading such that users are required to declare their presence. Where a chat room or IM application is designed to capture users' presence, twitter does the reverse. Users have to declare their presence and attention by using (@ or direct messages): "@username, Nice post!"

Social interaction design works by respecting the psychological and social, the ambiguity not the clarity, the unintended not the intended. The best a designer can do is set up a social architecture that structures and organizes participation well enough that users know what's going on, and therefore what to do. Social interaction designers start not from user needs but from user interests.

The bottom line for any social media company is know your users. Here again, social interaction design differs from non-social design. There is not just one user. There are not even several "personas." Instead, users differ by their communication and interaction styles, their ways of being social, their understanding of what they are doing and of what others are doing. For simplicity's sake, I segment users according to three types of interest: Self Interest, Other Interest, and Relational Interest. This comes from contemporary sociology and psychology, and goes roughly like this:

Self-interested users act from a position of Self
Other-interested users react to an Other (user)
Relationally-interested users interact through social activity

To provide a few examples, there are Facebook users whose activity centers on their own profile, which is a representation of their Self and an extension of it (into the mediated social world that is Facebook). These users may not even visit their friends' profiles. They interact around their own status updates, wall posts, profile page elements, and so on. Then there are Facebook users who spend more time browsing their friends' profiles, posting to their walls, reading their friends' updates. They do not begin communication on their own pages, talking about themselves, but begin by responding to a friend's post or update. There are then those in the third group, the socializers if you will, who play the numerous Facebook social apps. Drawn to social activity, they go where the action is.

We can see this on twitter, also. Some users post to their audiences about themelves. Some, finding this weird, read first and are inclined to respond. And others get into rounds of conversation, often including their friends by @naming them in their posts.

These are rough distinctions, and I will be the first to admit that there is no research as of yet into their viability. But they correspond to similar distinctions made by psychologists and sociologists, and after a year of thinking about core social interaction design principles, I have yet to come up with anything better.

And as it turns out, a similar three-part approach works for the user interface, which I call the social interface. Standard UI theory comes up short here also, because the UI is not only a representation of software features and functions, but is a medium through which users engage with other users. Imagine that you are sitting across from a friend. There is a screen between the two of you. Now in social media, that screen has three modes. It may be a mirror, and you see yourself reflected. Or it is a surface, and you see what your friend has posted on it. Or it is a window, and you can talk through it with your friend.

Design requirements are different for each mode. In the mirror mode, the interface should present an engaging and compelling reflection. In the surface mode, it should organize and structure content and navigation. And in the window mode, it should become transparent and unobtrusive.

Now these modes of the interface correspond nicely to our three user types. Self-interested users may engage in their projection and expression of themselves (mirror); Other-interested users may respond and talk to others (window). And Relationally-interested users may go where the action is (surface).

Marshall McLuhan, the patron saint of media theory, claimed that every new medium uses an old medium as its content. Social media use mass media for much of their content, and moreso for how to organize and lay out that content. We use print, web 1.0, software application UIs, as well as television, cameras, and radio. But we cannot understand how social media are used if we do not first understand what interests our users, in being on social media, in using them to connect and relate, and in reading what users have left behind.

This is still a very young medium, and there is much yet to come by way of innovating time-based conversation and self-presentation tools (see my brief on Swurl and a piece on designing for lifestreaming). I expect more innovation of the presentation layer, by means of Flash, for example. And of course there is mobile, which we are only beginning to mine for new and compelling experienced.

But if you are in the social media space, and feel that your product captures a good 80% of current uses and best practices (in terms of features and design), you might now invest the next 20% in cementing the user experience. I will post again soon with specific ideas for identifying your core user types and improving user experiences to raise participation levels.

For those of you who are interested in more, see:
Slideshare presenations on What Is Social Interaction Design, User Psychology, and User Competencies (or go here to download originals)
White papers

The Now Web: Not Now, Or Not Yet?

I have my Stanford reunion coming up tomorrow. At the risk of dating myself, it's my twentieth. I wrote my thesis at Stanford on an Apple Macintosh, which required swapping out floppy discs in order to run Microsoft Word (on one) with my ever-expanding tome on the other. Drafts were printed on a dot matrix printer, and in the final weeks of each quarter Meyer Library was overcome with a chattering Morse-like din that I can recall to this day. It was our version of an echo chamber.

For we did not have email. We did not even have modems.

In preparation for the reunion, some of us have encouraged our classmates to join Facebook. Of a class of about 1650 students, around 300 of us are on Facebook, and 80 of those 300 have joined the reunion group page. Only ten of us have listed twitter accounts. Clearly, we belong to a different generation. We stand for the Not Now social media users. Or possibly, the Not Yet social media users.

I don't know if this speaks to a generation gap or an experience gap. But if I belong to a generation that "doesn't get" social media, it is not entirely because we're computer illiterates. Many of my classmates have had rockstar careers in the tech industry. I seem to remember that some 40% of Oracle's new employees in 1989 were recent Stanford grads. If anything, we are a bridge generation: the first to use desktops, but prior to the domestication of the Internet.

The experience gap is not inexperience with machines, but is inexperience with their unique kind of social presence and interaction. We're not used to the practice of posting profiles about ourselves (I exclude myself), and of keeping constant contact (in a discontinuous and partial sort of way) with friends and colleagues. We're phone-based and email-based, and at our stage in life, time simply doesn't afford us the surplus attention with which to attach ourselves to the social web.

Time would be the reason most of us would cite for our online invisibility. But I think that there's something more.

For lack of a better phrase, I'll call it the "alienation" of social media. To integrate social media into your daily life you need to project yourself into it. You need to be able to live in a kind of time that's very different from the time of the everyday. You need to be able to pay attention without bankrupting your focus and concentration, need to be able to sustain high levels of availability to a world that's neither "here" nor "there," again, without dissociating from the here and now.

Computers were, to my generation, a tool, machine, an object: outside of us. We learned to use them as a means of extending our abilities and activities. In McLuhan's classic use of the phrase, computers were an extension of us. An extension, but nothing more. The machine was an object, and anything we did with it, and it with us, was simply that. The PC was an object, not a world. Turn it off, and nothing.

The social web is more than McLuhan could have seen. The social web is not an "extension of man" but a "network." By dint of its connectivity, it has communication. By dint of communication, it has relationships. By dint of relationships, it is a world. And as a world, it is in time. Those of us who are frequent users of social media know this time as a sense that there's ongoing activity "out there" -- regardless of whether we're on or in it at the time. Turn off the machine today, and wait.

To know what a social technology does, turn it off, not on. What it does is what you miss.

Fred Wilson describes the Now Web as the breed of "micro-blogging" applications and services we know from Twitter's storied success this year. A raft of lifestreaming applications now serve users who, unlike much of my generation, can and do live (at least for a time) in social media. I think the reference to "web" and "blogging" for tools in this space is a misnomer. For they're not really writing tools, but speaking tools. With a different kind of speaking, and of conversation, of course.

If profile-based social networking sites are page-based, lifestreaming apps are time-based.

The Now Web is engaged in not by writing (blogging), but by being in the flow (or by observing the flow from the river's edge, if that be your preference). The needs of time-based applications are different from those of the "conventional" web. If web 1.0 is page-based and print-derived, now-web is time-based and radio-derived.

Twitter is the internet generation's ham radio.

The businesses and applications designed around twitter, its siblings and cousins, will do well to consider the ways we relate to content and communication when it is time-based (further thoughts on designing lifestreaming apps).

• We are less likely to search, more likely to browse, skim, or check.
• Content comes in the form of news, announcements, reminders, and greetings -- speech-based acts not written reflections, arguments, or opinions.
• Messages lay a claim to our attention in the present -- not later or whenever is good for us.
• Content is organized around the now, which lacks the structure of taxonomy, genre, or other form.
• And if written content makes a claim to thinking, lifestreamed content is more likely to make a claim to attention: we engage in social encounters through our mutual acknowledgment and awareness of one another
• If the claims made in written content are "linguistic" -- that is, they are linguistically-mediated expressions -- lifestreamed content is more likely to be gestural, suggestive, indicative, relational.
• If the appeal made in written content is designed through statements, arguments, or narratives, then in the world of lifestreaming, it is more likely to be an appeal to acknowledgment and awareness.

Every medium screens back physical participation in communication and interaction, while also amplifying particular modes of expression and engagement. Lifestreaming applications screen back the sense of being in time, and of being with others in time. But they extend and amplify time by connecting multiple threads of time (each of us having our own).

It's early days yet for time-based social media and for social interaction design frameworks best suited to them. As we develop designs, interfaces, features, and new ways of engaging with others, with content, and with timelines appropriate to time-based and not page based social media, I suspect that we will be surprised. I believe the word is "serendipity": the discovery of something surprising that comes at just the right time.

Twitter Redesign

Twitter has undergone a small facelift as announced in the official blog, here. I seldom go to the website, so I might never have noticed, but 140Char's comments sparked my interest:

[From Cosmetic Changes To Twitter...]

So far, I’m experiencing the ‘Supermarket Effect’, which is demonstrated when your local supermarket moves everything around - and even if it actually makes shopping quicker, you still complain for the first 30 minutes that you can’t find anything.

The only problem which does immediately stand out is the fact the search box has been removed from my main page, which is a pain as I often search for people who might be on Twitter but haven’t shared their username. It’s now hidden under Find People, and then Search, which adds two clicks every time I want to quickly check someone.

Whiel I was there looking over the changes I noticed that I have clicked over to 4300+ followers.

Twitter - UI Changes, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

Matt Balara Interviews Me

Back in Copenhagen at Reboot, Matt Balara (now a contributor here at /Message) pulled me into his series "What's Design Mean To You?", and he posted the video today at his mattbalara.com blog. I think I do a fairly good job describing the remedial sort of (re)design that I do a lot of the time. People generally get the basic 'clean piece of paper' sort of design that I put into Nerdvana or Workstreamer.

I was fascinated to learn that people don't know what I do:

[from mattbalara.com : “ What’s Design Mean to You? An Interview with Stowe Boyd” Aug. 9, 2008 by Matt Balara]

Funnily enough, a number of people at Reboot asked me, “what exactly does Stowe do?” Admittedly, I didn’t really know exactly either. He explains it quite well in the interview.

And what’s Stowe’s take on design?

It’s the laying out of processes or models that represent some thing that’s going to be built or manufactured.

Beauty Disclaimers: Plazes

I wonder if all tool makers should be as candidly disarming as the Plazes folks:

[from Inbox - Plazes - Right Plaze, Right People, Right Time]

Let's face it, your Plazes inbox hasn't exactly been a beautiful site. We've cleaned it up for you so that you'll be able to easily scan through and react on the different types of incoming notifications and messages in the future. Sorry about any inconveniences this might cause you, if you are missing anything please get in touch with us.