Social interaction designers' work has to be focused on user interests and experience unlike user needs. By Adrian Chan (Contagious ideas by PSST : spreading 2.0 innovation (editor = jérémy dumont, strategic planner, france))

29 December 2009

Social interaction designers' work has to be focused on user interests and experience unlike user needs. By Adrian Chan

A Social Interaction 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’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.

Social interaction designers start not from user needs but from user interests.

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.

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