Robert,
Thanks for your engaging response. I see SxD as a subspecies of, but
not identical to IxD. Simply because the interaction is user :
software : user (not user : software). There are two or more subjects
involved, not one, and this sets up the necessity (theoretically) for
a paradigm based on human communication and social interaction, not
human - machine interaction. In the latter, there is one dimension of
contingency in "meaning," that is the individual user's intention,
motive, and resulting behavior. But in mediated social interaction,
there is a double contingency (this term is straight out of
linguistics), which is to say that the subject can anticipate the
other subject's interpretation to his/her acts, and takes these into
account. There would be no "etiquette" or "social practices," rituals,
etc online if each of us were not attuned to what's going on and how
to behave, *socially.*
I have enormous respect for Cooper and for personas, but again, I
think they're misapplied if used in social media interaction design. i
don't think user behavior is dictated by lifestyle choices, etc, but
by proximate communication and interaction motives. Some of these
aren't even conscious to the user -- such as self-esteem, flirtation,
popularity, and so on. Users have psychological interests, in
themselves, in how they look to others, in what they believe others
think of them, in others, in an audience at large, and so on -- and
these transcend lifestyle choices. Users also have moods, attitudes,
dispositions, and these cannot be accounted for in lifestyle
preferences for they shift and change, and again, transcend lifestyle.
Personally, I think Clay Shirky is a rockstar and his work and
presentations are fantastic. But I don't think we can explain behavior
by social network analysis (SNA). And SNA would be the first to admit
that as a theory it treats the user (or node) as a black box. One can
describe and observe social networks by graphing nodes and edges, but
the view taken explains phenomena as constrained by network relations
-- it doesnt describe motivations, intentionality, or experience.
To get to experience, speaking strictly theoretically, you have to
have a theory of consciousness or mind, or "subjectivity" -- that's
not treated by SNA.
You're absolutely right that connectedness plays a part in the
behavior of users in social networks. But it's not adequate, in and of
itself, to describe user experience. We would need to map the tools we
can use to observe, track, and measure activity (objective model) with
a subjective framework for the framing and proceeding of mediated
interactions.
cheers!
adrian
On Oct 14, 2008, at 9:55 PM, Robert Reimann wrote:
Adrian,
Thanks for your post and link to a thoughtful article.
In some respects, the idea of SxD reminds me of the beginnings of
the web,
when IA was touted as a new field that reflected the unique aspects of
design for this new medium. But those of us who had been doing IxD
before
the web realized that this was not really the case: designing for
the web
had unique constraints due to available technology: our prediction
was that
as web technology improved, IA and IxD would become nearly
indistinguishable, which is close to where we are now.
So what of SxD? Well, I have to admit that, like Juan, I am
skeptical of
most of the differences you seek to draw. The methods and principles
of IxD
discussed in About Face and other volumes hold up, I believe, quite
well in
social software contexts, assuming that you understand the user
behaviors
and motivations. The challenges of identifying user behavior patterns
(personas) for consumer social networking applications are the same
as those
for any consumer software: behavior is dictated by lifestlye
choices, which
can be difficult to nail down compared to enterprise applications,
where
business roles are usually well-defined and user behaviors have a
relatively
close mapping to them.
That said, your observations about Facebook behavior patterns are
quite
interesting, and highlight something that may be unique about social
networking applications: significant usage patterns may perhaps be
described
almost mathematically by the relationships between nodes in the
network.
Clay Shirky described this for blogs years ago in this article:
http://shirky.com/writings/powerlaw_weblog.html
His observation is basically that connections in the network
determine blog
site "behavior" and influence in the blogosphere. When blogs attract
large
numbers of incoming links, the nature of those blogs tends to change
to that
of a broadcast medium. Blogs with low numbers of incoming links
remain more
conversational.
I think this basic idea can be generalized to all social networks:
there
seem to be 3 basic states for a node in a social network as defined
by its
connectivity: it can have many more incoming connections than
outgoing, many
more outgoing than incoming, or roughly equal incoming and outgoing
connections. In addition, there is a continuum of total connections,
from
few to many. Applying this to your Facebook example, your self-
oriented
users would have more incoming connections (viewers) than outgoing.
Your
other-oriented would have the reverse; they would primarily be
viewing/touching other nodes. Your relation-oriented would have
roughly
equally interactions with others. I think that the differences in
connection
volumes may be another interesting dimension for you to explore
there in
term of behaviors and motivations. To me this is all fascinating
because of
the possibility of intuiting a set of behavior patterns from what
amounts to
a mathematical model, which is obviously not a typical approach to
persona
creation. Of course, while it may describe WHAT people are doing, it
doesn't
detail WHY, which is where qualitiative user research and more typical
persona development would come into the picture.
So, my conclusion? Social networks are interesting because some of the
behavior of the system is dependent on the topology of the network.
That is
certainly a difference from unitary application design, but is it
enough to
call SxD its own field? I'm not certain, but I don't think so. But
it is at
the very least an area of IxD that is ripe for exploration.
Robert.
Robert Reimann
IxDA Seattle
Associate Creative Director
frog design
Seattle, WA
On Tue, Oct 14, 2008 at 5:22 PM, adrian chan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
Folks,
It's been a long while since I posted here, but wanted to solicit
feedback
on this brief intro to Social Interaction Design (design for social
media)
http://www.gravity7.com/blog/media/2008/10/social-interaction-design-primer.html
It's a short piece on how social interaction design differs from
conventional UI and user experience design, and in it I attempt an
overview
of the three kinds of user and three modes of the social interface.
All feedback welcome -- in comments or here!
thanks!
adrian chan
415 516 4442
Social Interaction Design (www.gravity7.com)
Sr Fellow, Society for New Communications Research (www.SNCR.org)
LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com/in/adrianchan)
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cheers,
adrian chan
415 516 4442
Social Interaction Design (www.gravity7.com)
Sr Fellow, Society for New Communications Research (www.SNCR.org)
LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com/in/adrianchan)
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