Principles of Social Interaction Design (pdf)

Posted on February 10, 2012 by Adrian Chan

Imperfect and unfinished as any project on contemporary products will be, my Principles of Social Interaction Design is now available for free download. This project has taken a couple of years, and in places bears the marks of a theory worked out over time. Some of my core concepts appeared in my blog posts first. These include the idea of frames — for both conceptualizing interactions, as well as for design thinking. Concepts of mediation, of symbolic tokens, of realtime streams may also be familiar from topics I have blogged about over the years. I have developed these into simple logics.

Now, as always, I believe that mediation is real — mediated interactions should not be understood by their simple reference to face to face situations. Mediation makes a real and measurable difference. And this difference is experienced and produced as a mental engagement, by means of which users fabricate, imagine, project, internalize, and much more, their interpretations of others and of social worlds in general.

As always, I believe that any designer of social tools should appreciate the multi-faceted manner in which these experiences become motives; orientations; activities; and ultimately, social practices. The user experience is, in social interaction design, both more necessary, and farther from reach.

For all its faults, this is an attempt to collect my thoughts on social interaction design into a single piece. One can do more with an argument in this format than one can with a blog post. Time permitting, I will revise this project as practices and tools change.

Many sources were drawn upon for this project:  from contemporary designers/thinkers/bloggers to canonical sociological, psychological, and linguistic frameworks. My effort to pull together theoretical and conceptual architecture from outside the design world, in order to accommodate the needs of both mediated user experiences and emergent social practices, is unorthodox. Hence I am calling this an essay. I am excited to see it develop over time.

 

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Big data, social data: which matters more?

Posted on December 12, 2011 by Adrian Chan

By all accounts, there’s a big data revolution on its way, and soon. New, distributed, and increasingly real time database and data warehousing solutions have made big data storage and querying more viable. Data collection, of course, continues apace. And the number of data sources available, too, continues to grow.

The big data problem and solution, as it stands today, is very simply a matter of: what to do with it. Data reveals insights only as good as the organization mining for them. Even patterns need to be coded into queries — and that has to be done by somebody interested in searching for the pattern in the first place.

So while big data holds an immense amount of potential insight — it’s not obvious what this insight is. Nor whether, once identified, it can be made useful. (To wit, the many data analysts currently confounded by financial breakdowns.)

Given that big data is the type of data to make its truths at scale, that is, by means of high altitude “observations” of very small things, two orders of the big data query emerge: the big and the small. The big, in which the “meaning” of the data is determined. And the small, or the relevant data itself.

There’s no finding value in the small bits of data without first determining the big picture views one hopes to obtain. The need for both big data strategy as well as big data tactics is fascinating. It should not only open new vistas on worlds and patterns not seen before; it should lead to new kinds of business, decision-making, forecasting, marketing, and much more.

Where then does social data fit in? Social data is data about users: their activities, identities, habits, relationships, interests etc on social networks and social media. Social data should be about what users do. Its the exhaust, if you will, of their actions and communication. And ideally well suited to the aims of commerce.

Sometimes it seems that big data contains social data. Other times not. But if big data includes social data within its purview, then an interesting question arises. For social data, presumably, is a different kind of data.

The issue concerns what the data means. And since social data is often activity data, it’s more than data. A tweet may be tweeted to somebody. A share, because it expresses a user’s interests. Events attended because there are friends there. Or because the user is a fan.

In other words, social data isn’t data about something, it’s data created by the action of somebody. Data about events, things, objects is that: objective. Data produced by people interacting and communicating is subjective: it needs to be interpreted, because it is intentional.

It would seem that these two kinds of data won’t mix very well. Data about a population, for example, vs data created by its members. The former view of big data would suggest making use of patterns for efficiencies. The social data view would suggest micro-targeting individuals based on their behaviors. The former wants to better grasp correlations, high level views, and find meaning by mining. The latter wants to describe individuals more accurately, richly, and target behaviors based on expectations.

Big data and social data are not one and the same. But nor are they mutually exclusive. Both tell stories worth paying attention to. It will be interesting to see what comes for each — and of course, who is involved.

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Lean UX and lean startups: is trial and error the best way forward?

Posted on December 9, 2011 by Adrian Chan

Lean UX is meant to be the user experience design approach best suited to the lean startup. Lean startups are meant to be the best business approach suited to the startup industry. And agile development, it goes without saying, the best development model.

It’s hard to contest these on the basis of budgets, market conditions, and even to some extent the needs of social tools early in development. Developers need users, not just to test out product stability and functionality, but to provide feedback also. By starting small, startups get to test out their designs for MVP.

But I can’t help wonder whether this method is the best we can come up with. For in some respects it is less a method and more a justification of trial and error by means of factors unrelated to design. Developers, and designers, surely have expectations of what will happen when their social tool is first used. Entrepreneurs surely have expectations of the same. Perhaps developers and designers base their insights on personal or industry observations. While entrepreneurs might be more informed by the business impact or problem-solution assumptions that they have made.

While there is nothing egregiously misguided about either of these approaches. They’re eminently practical. But given that so many social startups either fail outright, or soon pivot (and sometimes more than once), you can’t help but wonder if there’s a something missing.

From personal professional experience, as well as excessive use of social tools, it strikes me that the lean startup approach lacks a certain amount of spherical mass when it comes to social design. Not that users and social are an afterthought. But that they are an assumption. It is assumed, on the basis of success elsewhere (logical, yes), that users can be expected to adopt and embrace this in the same manner they use that (fallacious).

If we have learned anything, it is that social is not just technology and technique, but also culture, adoption, beach-heading, community management, and so much more. The assumption that what works in one context will work equally well in a different one is perhaps logical. But the conclusion drawn from it — plow ahead and do more or less what they did, but marginally better — is false. Users don’t make a move for the marginally better.

The lack of courage comes into play then when it comes to thinking both differently and better. One might blame this on the industry’s disposition towards financial risk-taking; which is accompanied by an aversion to risk in the user experience department.

That entrepreneurs might be more keen to spend large sums of money on things that more or less exist elsewhere in the marketplace, but shy from the risk of new or different user experiences, makes no sense. And certainly isn’t a design methodology. It suggests to me only that the industry has more confidence in the proven use of existing social tools than it does in its understanding of users, what they want, do, and why.

Every successful new social tool took a risk on user behaviors and social outcomes. Users are entirely capable of new experiences. They can be understood, and their responses to new social products can be anticipated. So, too, can social outcomes — or what happens when user adoption scales.

Perhaps it’s just me, and my own bias. Perhaps it is that neither design nor engineering pass through much social theory, anthropology, or psychology. Perhaps it is just how the industry works — risk on financially, risk off on design. From where I stand, however, the less lean startup methodology could use some fleshing out.

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