Lecture 8: Designing for Social Interaction

Dr. Xiangyu WANG

Agenda Today

• 2:00-2:40: lecture • 2:40-3:00: reflection of studio design last week• 3:00-4:00:

– group 6-10 work on “designing a studio” in Secondlife with Taiwan student for ONE HOUR.

– Group 1-5 can discuss the design results of last week with the instructors or discuss next week’s design.

• Other Announcements:– Next week tutorial: “designing a workstation” in

Secondlife with Taiwan.– The final presentation is on May 28th – The final exam is 2-3 pm on June 4th.– The final report is due midnight 16th June (report

email to Irene rche0750@mail.usyd.edu.au)

Outline

• Design principles for Social Interaction

• Two Examples

• Blog and Wiki

Web as A Social Technology• Technology can play an important role in

enabling people to interact with each other.

• The Web is one such technology with the affordances for sharing information and for connecting people to people.

Web as A Social Technology

• A social technology should enable people to:– Share experiences– Expose tacit knowledge– Make recommendations– Discuss different topics– Get to know other people– Work together– …

Social interaction components

• Common ground– Shared understanding among collaborators that permit

interactions to proceed smoothly and the shared context for the social interaction

• Awareness– State of knowing or being informed that enables collaborators to

interpret others’ actions and to guide one’s own actions. Consists of a combination of people, activity and contextual awareness.

• Social interaction mechanisms– Enablers and tools for social interactions that allow people to act

and interact• Place making

– The cultural and social understanding of the norms and practices appropriate to an interaction setting that emerges over time and through users adapting and appropriating the setting

• How might one build Web sites that have a focus on people and social interactions?

Design Principles for Social Interaction

• System-oriented approach:– Kim’s nine strategies cover purpose, people,

gathering places, evolving roles, leadership, rules and policies, planned events, rituals, and support of sub-groups as well as a variety of technologies for each strategy.

– Kim’s set of underlying design principles:• Design for growth and change• Create and maintain feedback loops• Empower members over time

Design Principles for Social Interaction

• Preece’s set of design principles:– Designing for usability– Supporting sociability

• purpose, • people and roles,• policies related to governance, membership, codes of conduct, privacy,

security, and copyright protection.

• Kollock’s set of design principles emphasize the need for:– Support for repeated social interaction– A persistent identity built on information about the person and their

behavior until now– Well-defined group boundaries– the evolution of norms and rules regarding collective resources– a means to monitor and sanction member’s behavior.

Two Web Examples for Social Interaction

• Portkey: developed for the summer interns at IBM TJ Watson RC to enable interns to exchange information and develop a proper social network in their new environment.

• CHIplace: developed for the ACM CHI 2002 conference to “extend the interaction opportunities…”

Portkey

CHIplace

Challenges for CHIplace and Portkey

• Encouraging user participation

• Fostering social interactions

• Promoting visibility of people and their activities

• Designing for usability

• Maintaining the site with minimal resources

Encouraging participation

• Create awareness about the sites to drive traffic (e.g. email announcement)

• Sustain awareness of what is new (e.g. devoted area in the site, newsletter sent to interested people, different forms of notification)

• Reward program• Identifying participation• Differences between registered users and non

registered ones

Fostering Social Interactions

• the importance of scheduled events in reinforcing a sense of belonging.

• the importance of two individuals meeting again in the future as a condition for cooperative relationships to emerge and persist.

• Repeated social interactions are important for – increasing familiarity, – developing relationships, – reminding people about what they have in common, – strengthening ties to an organization – helping to develop a positive regard for the social

system

Promoting visibility

• persistent and up-to-date identity and ccommunity governance system in place

• it can help “people to get to know each other.”• recognizing the kindness and efforts of

individuals can help motivate people to help others.– The reasons are that helping others can increase self-

esteem, personal identification with organization, stature within the organization, feelings of commitment, helping to strengthen the social organization, and helping to promote generalized reciprocity.

Promoting visibility

• Participant’s profile

• Traces of explicit and implicit actions (e.g. CHIplace trivia) “empowers authors and readers by recognizing the author’s efforts and the readers’ interest”

Promoting visibility

• Social browsing tools– List of people that joined

most recently (with picture)– Gallery of selected pictures

of members– People directories sorted,

e.g., by last name or country– Grouping of people with

similar roles (HCIplace)

Designing for usability

• Simple form for registration of profile

• Service for resetting password

• Personalization of information

• Visible navigation structure

• Structuring of the information clearly related to the information needs of people in different working stages

Blog

• A blog is a web-based publication consisting primarily of periodic articles (normally, but not always, in reverse chronological order). “From Wikipedia”.

• Most blogs: by ordinary people as a medium of personal communication and expression

Blog

• Blogs combine the immediacy of up-to-the minute posts, latest first, with a strong sense of the author’s personality, passions, and point of view.

• Motivations for the individual to blog– “document my life”– commentary– community forum

Blog

• A blog entry typically consists of the following:– Title, the main title, or headline, of the post. – Body, main content of the post. – Permalink, the URL of the full, individual article. – Post Date, date and time the post was published.

• A blog entry optionally includes the following:– Comments – Categories (or tags) - subjects that the entry

discusses – Trackback and or pingback - links to other sites that

refer to the entry

Wiki

• A wiki is a type of website that allows visitors to easily add, remove, or otherwise edit and change some available content, sometimes without the need for registration.

• This ease of interaction and operation makes a wiki an effective tool for collaborative authoring.

• The online encyclopedias such as Wikipedia.