The three-fold view of the social media user experience

Because I have an enormous white paper in the works on this one that I know I won't complete any time soon, I want to appeal to like-minded social web thinkers on this with a short post. I spent much of the winter drafting a grand theory of social media practices, and when it came to exploring the user experience I spent a couple months trying to observe my own use of social media, and observe others, to see I could intuit core principles. I nearly went nuts doing it. Everything I was doing on facebook for a while I was doing as a self-observing participant, that is, I didn't allow myself to "get into" it with friends and colleagues but instead tried to dissociate my actions from my agency in order to be able to reflect on my own motivations and inner dialogue.

I don't know if this has happened to others, but I began developing self-reflexive loops and circuits that accompanied what I was doing. Even silly things like Poke. I wanted to know what Poke was, and what it might be to different people, so I tried being a different user when I poked. Poking to flirt, poking to reply, feeling a poke as an expectation, or as an annoyance, leaving a poke un-repoked to see at what point I felt obliged to poke back, or even to see if I thought my poky friend had noticed that I hadn't poked back.

I was documenting all of this in order to flesh out a psychologically-oriented framework for the user experience. One that would replace straight ahead user "needs" and "goals", which work for user-software interaction design, with a self-reflexive set of user interests -- better suited for user-software-user, or social interaction design. It seemed to me obvious that user intentions, motives, compulsions, obsessions, fantasies, interactions, expectations, anticipations, preoccupations all played a part in the user engagement. That each user would probably have habits and routines of use that were a direct manifestation of his or her sensitivities in different areas of a) sense of self, self-presentation, and self image; b) perceptions of friends, unfamiliars, and audiences; and c) interpersonal communication, relationship handling, and interaction styles.

In short, it seemed that a rewriting of user experience approaches to social media would require a wholistic and integrated, and deeply psychological, approach.

The work is mostly done, in a frightfully intricate and bejungled draft. But it's all in the noggin and there for easy access at all times.

I'd like to share a couple inventions that fell upon me through the process of structuring my experience as an observant participant and participating observer.

The first was that the user experience is structured around three axes: self/self image, other, and relationship. This now seems so clear to me that I don't know why it took so long to see. The user experience of social media is not a direct interaction of user to medium. But rather one that involves the user's self-understanding of his/her own activity, and in which s/he has ideas about how s/he is, looks, and appears to others. The reason is simple: all social media show the user an image or presentation of him/herself. There's a doubling, if you will, of the self, because it's represented.

Then there is the other (user), who's not "there" in presence, but is represented. So any interaction with another user requires interpretation. You could say that we have to interpret what we each mean to each other, and in conversation, in everyday reality. But it's different online and we know it. And interpretation is only possible if we know something about the medium and the other person -- something requiring what I call "interpretive schemata" and which vary incredibly and are contingent on the site, users, activities, content, and much more.

Then there is the relationship, which is a real unfolding of interaction by means of digital recording/capture and re-presentation. So there are similarly numerous variations in the kinds of interactions handled online, and their meaning to users. What they mean to users is in part a reflection of their relationship tendencies. Any psychologist would support that.

The mental image that came to mind for this was a cool discovery. Software designers talk about transparency -- that the software's functionality and UI should be transparent. Ease of use suggests the goal of transparency (that the UI not get in the way or be something the user has to "think about" while using it). But I decided this isn't the case with social media. The visualization was that the screen is three screens. Each ties to the three core axes: self, other, and relation. The three screens are mirror, surface, and window.

Users are in a relationship to themselves, through their self-reflection as mirrored by social media (think facebook profile). Or users are engaged, by means of interpretive schemata, with what's on the screen, as videos, news, search, whatever. And thirdly, users see through the screen, as it provides a direct window onto another user, as in chat, im, email etc (where the "screen UI" really isn't material to the user activity).

That's it. Chan's three-fold view of the social media user experience.

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Hashing through twitter hashtags -- a look at structured conversation

In my ongoing binge to ferret out the social mechanics of twitter third party sites and tools, hashtags deserves attention. It's small, and by all appearances might die on the vine, which would be sad. But if the great culling whose season draws near were to remove hashtags from the social media dna pool, it would be for reasons owing less to the operationaI think and more to fundamental problems with the user experience.

Hashtags make a big demand on the twitterer. They ask that she tag up posts while writing, which requires a) added effort, b) a pause to reflect on meta while composing, c) a sense of the benefit provided to folks who search by tag in the future. (A) and (b) pull the user out of the immediacy of twittering -- not much, but maybe enough to matter.

I remember working with a startup that was into the idea of tagging up chats for better discovery -- of like-minded chatters and of topically-related chats. I thought the idea was great, especially because chats aren't logged, and in theory at least the promise of social web is to connect people around what they talk about (in common). But to get meta from talk requires either automation or a change of user behavior. Either sites and services mine talk for the meta, and build links and suggestions of topics and talkers, or the user declares meta while talking (or just after, as in tagging).

Chat was one problem, twitter is similar. Because twitter is a kind of slow-moving chat. And like all other feed-related sites and tools, twitter I think aims to do more than provide dis-intermediated chat channels. Unless I'm completely mistaken, there are a lot of folks out there who believe that there's value in fast web conversations, call it feeds, micro-blogging, or what have you.

And because it's always hard to structure a conversation and to keep it on topic, not to mention expect users to follow topical threads, the goal of hashtags was to capitalize on what's said *inside* of posts. Their benefit would be to extract topical continuity and consistency from disparate flows (conversations) -- to re-flow if you will, by tag.

The benefit of exposing and surfacing common topical threads from talk accrues primarily to those who come along after the posts have been published. That's the purpose of topical mining, and it's an approach to making the web useful that Google has mastered for pages. But for posts, or conversational turns, the challenge is huge.

Conversation is notoriously poor at providing explicit meta about itself. It's just not how it works or how we talk. We know what we're talking about when we talk, and it involves the person(s) with whom we're talking. We don't declare what we're talking about if it can be already understood. Seo is built on this -- embedding meta in copy and pages for better search results. If you're talking about orchids you're unlikely to speak "flowers" in the same breath. We don't supply meta while talking (Dave Sifry used to describe this as getting meta out of the exhaust).

A lot of social web sites live on the principle of using a small number of active participants to produce content that can be enjoyed by those who come later. The good ones, like Yelp, offload the member-to-member communication from the topical content as much as possible. In Yelp's case, with gestural tokens, a questions page, etc -- to keep the reviews as clean as possible. (Could tweeted reviews work even? They'd devolve into highly subjective recommendations probably.)

Two challenges face hashtags. First is getting the user to tag as an act of talking. Second is that all tags are equal. There's neither vertical hierarchy (tag, subtag, subsubtag) nor modal organization. The latter is interesting, and worth a note, and since I just made it up I need to think out loud here a minute.

Talk is not all equal. Statements of speech can be declarative, performative, can be a form of request or appeal, and so on. Just think of the differences in the kind of utterance that are: invitation, recommendation, flirt, factual declaration, opinion, observation, question, answer. Modal organization of tweets would suggest that in addition to semantic tagging we have statement types: question, recommendation, announcement, link, flirt, and so on. You can see where this goes: Yahoo has Answers, Facebook has social apps, Linkedin has recommendations, Yelp has symbolic tokens, Google has (wait, google doesnt seem to get social. oops), etc etc.

So on hashtags, if you root around, you'll find some totally unorganized examples of this. There are (and oddly or not so oddly enough Germans seem to have gotten into organizing talk -- I lived in Berlin for a year and a half so I've had fun comparing German and English equivalents...). On hashtags there are posts tagged "now," "love" "jokes" -- tags that suggest the modal type of tweet. "Now" is not a topic but leads to conversations about what users are doing. "Love" is as much an expressive identifier (I'm in love, who's in love?) as much as it is a factual identifier. "Jokes" is topical, but it also is an attractor for quips and humor -- and joking is a performative form of speech unto itself if anything is.

When social media work to produce informative content for those who primarily consume, it's because they are a means of production. By analogy to the industrial age, the communication age (our era) uses information technologies as means of production. Communication acts leave behind content. Interaction tools that simultaneously publish to a public, as are all social media, "manufacture" a new form of talk. It's mass media gone social. But we know this already.

Is there a soft or hard threshold, then, for social media tools that ask the user to produce meta while in the act of posting/talking? Believers in the public utility of the social web as a means of democratizing the media and information might say no. Believers in connectivity, communication, and the social utility of social media might say yes. Hashtags sits between the two.

Much of my work involves helping social media companies to engineer interactions and communication for the purpose of producing leftover utility to latecomers and consumers. It's a social engineering challenge -- call it the art of generating unintended utility out of useful socially practices. It's an art because it requires engaging the user's motivation. Incentives (to benefit consumers by writing restaurant reviews) only work for a handful of users. For most, the byproduct of added value has to be in the exhaust -- and the act of participation should be enough in itself to motivate engagement. Users simply have to like using the tools -- for their own reasons (which are many indeed, but that's a whole different story).

Let's quickly take a look at this from a different angle -- social media marketing. Twitter offers the promise of mining and tracking conversations, if not participating in them, with an unprecedented degree of proximity, directness, and immediacy. Twitter search engines and meme trackers currently offer more breadth than hashtags for the simple reason that many more users simply type "movies" than type "#movies." But check "movies" on a site like summize (say you're a social media marketer), and results will include this: "Uncle. I can't work on this paper anymore. Let's go to the movies!." Use hashtags and you'll get better posts, though far fewer, because users have declared their topical selection of "movies." Intent is among the metrics measured by those in social analytics, and you can't get better than hashtags for that.

If only users could be asked to declare their intentions while conversing so that mining companies could extract the gold! No, it seems far more likely that the success stories and serendipitous moments ahead for web 2.0 will be found among those tools that can engineer social interactions such that the meta is an accurate but unintended byproduct of talk and engagement. (Beacon?) We'll have to watch this unfold and keep testing the frontiers. Either way, there's a lot to talk about.

Hashtags

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Reputation, Conversational Index, Twitter, and Tweeterboard

I geeked out on tweeterboard.com last night and found myself getting lost in the conversation metrics the site displays in its box score tab, and which it presumably uses to calculate reputation scores. Their metric's not transparent to me, and if anyone has thoughts on how they calculate reputation, I'd love to hear from you. But I got to thinking about it, and so began mapping a few measurements of my own to see if they made sense.

In doing so, it quickly became apparent that "reputation" is in itself a fuzzy marker. And in the context of conversation and conversation analysis, especially.

For example, reputation speaks of the person, firstly. A person has a reputation. How is it earned? By their identity? By what they say? By who they know? And who knows them? By appearance, or by fact? By integrity, consistency, and other personal attributes. But also by their social status, their contributions, credibility, and effectiveness even.

In terms valuable to social media marketing, reputation might mean influence to some. Authority to others. Credibility and experience. Popularity and social capital. Participation and involvement. Also responsiveness and social value as a hub or connector.

Perhaps reputations are multiple -- reputation for something. For leadership, for success, for matchmaking, for consistency, for connectedness, for influence, for independence.

And if reputation is also to be used for something, that is, leveraged in womm viral campaigns, for example, consumers/users will offer value according to the type of reputation they have.

A social media marketer might want influence in some campaigns, might want to reach experts in another, or reach connectors/inviters for yet another. If the social marketer wanted campaign traction by pushing a branding campaign across the social graph, for example, his or her point of access and entry would suggest that s/he use influencers of a certain type. For popularizing, a user with a reputation for popularity. For credibility, a user with a reputation for integrity and expertise. For event promotion, a user with a reputation for being first to know and for inviting friends. And so on.

Individual influence varies according the communicability of their status in a social graph/social network. I have friends whose restaurant recommendations I would take no questions asked, others who can recommend films, music, or car repair. But they're all different people. Recommendations are personal, and so there's little knowing about a recommender without knowing about his or her relationships.

Which was why this exercise was so interesting: conversations captured on twitter at tweeterboard reveal several of the elements critical to reputation analysis. Granted that without semantic content analysis, they're only structural. Interesting nonetheless, however.

So now, to tweeterboard and this exercise in imagining reputation metrics. First off would be the conventional Friend and Follower count. Should be fine, but there are already potential issues here. (Note: by analogy to serp/seo/sem speak, friends = links; followers/followed should = link polarity.)

Number of followers : should indicate influence by means of popularity. However twitter users add friends as fast as Britney Spears loses them. Friends make a person look like somebody, are a friction-free connection (on twitter), and are a means to being found. In other words not a good enough indicator in and of itself.

Number following : should indicate enagement, and some amount of social context. You follow who you know, and who you find interesting. But here, too, the number is biased. It serves to enhance a user's appearance, and is not an declaration of either interest (level or kind) or attention (listeners are not always listening).


So then qualify influence by number of people with posting frequency (for participation level) and post volume (for engagement).

Number of posts: Post volume and frequency is the currency of measure on a conversation tool. Like money supply and velocity, posts are flow volume and rate of flow. Here again, there is an issue, for when it comes to reputation, all posts are equal but some posts are more equal than others. There are users who produce torrents of tweets, and who clearly enjoy twitter as a kind of group IM/chat. And others who post to make a point. And all points in between. Activity online is not all action, and communication online is often inactive communication (or communicative inaction -- a bug/feature that Facebook has raised to a cultural phenom with its activity, news, and friend feeds and status updates).

Communication becomes action, so say the linguists, when it takes the form of moves: statement - response. Talk is serial by nature, and so conversation usually involves a round of moves, or what we sometimes call "turn taking." The low rate of response and the improbability of responsiveness on a public or semi-public chat tool like twitter is a simple and direct byproduct and symptom of the technology's presence bracketing. Users don't know who's paying attention, not to mention who's listening. If talk were supposed to be a reciprocal exchange of linguistically embedded claims upon speaker and listener leading to understanding, agreement or even consensus, twitter would not be our first choice of talk format!

But that's what makes it so compelling -- clearly "conversation" doesn't even begin to describe what twitter is or does. Social media are about new forms of talk (and new forms of presence). I'm preaching to the choir -- we all get this.

Onward, to more of what Tweeterboard must presumably fold into its fluffy mix of conversational dough (read: currency ;-) ).

The spread: Now this one is fascinating. High spread numbers (e.g. between two twitter users, number posts to @recipient vs number posts received from recipient to @sender) indicate asymmetry. Meaning that these users don't like each other equally? No way to know that, so how about these one user wants more from the other? A negative spread shows that the user sending messages isn't getting equal number of replies. The issue here is that we can't measure the relationship by sent/replied because twitter is imperfect. @name messages may go unheeded because they're missed -- that simple. Message delivery is imperfect on twitter because so many users prefer to @name in public (for valid social reasons, mostly) than direct message (even tho the latter offers a higher delivery guarantee). Posting @name in public accrues visibility and social capital to the sender, not to mention findability. Same for positive spreads.

So perhaps the thing to measure in the spread is the degree of spread (I've seen 0:50). Or the range of spreads in the aggregate. Then a user who has a tight and narrow range of spreads would be a responsive user, an attentive user. A wide and wild range of spreads would be an inconsistent, unresponsive user. This is plausible, tho spam posts would screw this one up and require yet another round of filters (If I receive spam posts I don't want to lose reputation points just because I've not replied to them).

Then there's the difference between @name posts and @name citations. When a tweet begins with @name, it's usually for @name. But if @name is cited within a post, it's possible that the message expresses thanks, recognition, or is a citation, promotion, or other form of social referencing and distribution. I wouldn't have a clue if tweeterboard makes the distinction. The high degree of @name citations on twitter would suggest it that these uses could be used to build soft (tacit) social graphs. (Interesting thought: a Milieu Metric).

Some, and often highly influential twitter users, also show a large number of orphaned post exchanges. These show up as 0:1 or 1:0, and are indicated in the box score as 1 or -1. A very large number of 1's might indicate that other twitterers want to be in this user's audience and circle. But again, it might simply mean the user missed the @name message. Hard to know intent, but absolute number of 1's/-1's would seem to suggest visibility and social capital.

Getting creative, here are few other possibilities that spring to this (now tired) mind.


@name cited (but never sent to @name : this might indicate rubbing elbows, or wanting to appear in the company of @name. Benefit to user posting but not directly communicating to @name would be apparent social capital (what I like to call social media's proclivity not just for appearance but also "apparancy").

@recipient_name sent or cited and leading to other @recipient_name citations : this might indicate a tight social clique of users attentive to each other. @name messages get the attention of others and solicit uptake. For example "congrats to @name for whatever" leads to a round of "yeah congrats @name!". Could be used by marketers to suss out active trust circles.
ditto for: @recipient_name sent or cited and leading to other @recipient_name replies

@recipient_name sent or cited and leading to other @sender_name replies : would raise the former to the level of friendship, e.g. from clique to group. Because in this version the reply is more than a citation, it's reply. Attention is paid not just to the @name cited but to the @sender who posted the citation. Could be used by marketers to suss out active conversationalists.

@recipient_name sent or cited and leading to other @sender_name citations : is somewhat uncommon, but responding to the poster not just the post is a sign of friendly attention and might be a metric of social presence. This is a "great to see you" moment and proffers a measure of relational density. Unless the message is nasty and mean, it's a sign of friendship, for the users are acknowledging each other (from "i follow you to I see you," or to quote Genesis, "Follow you, follow me"; every look wants a look back, and online "I see you" must be stated explicitly, so it's always *already* "I see you and therefore I want to see you seeing me" -- and on twitter, if this is in front of others, all the better!)

Ok, enough for now. I came up with more but you'll have to hire me. (just kidding.)

Damn I love twitter.

gratitude and respect goes to Stowe Boyd for pushing the conversational index long ago, and for reflections on twitter and the flow

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Groundswell Social Technographics quiz, or Some of the Above

Take this social technographics quiz and see whether you agree with the results. I can't agree with mine, but that's probably because I found it hard! Several of the questions were for women (I checked male but the quiz isnt gendered), and frankly it's hard for me to answer anything other than "hire a planner" when asked to imagine that I'm a bride getting worked up for the big day.

There weren't any "none of the above" choices, and the questions and multiple choice answers were highly specific. I agree that "self-reporting" what you think you are may be less accurate than a contextualize question (if you were at a party...), but some of these survey questions offered a tough set of responses.

No wonder I came out as a spectator. I think by the criteria used in this survey, creators are those who want to tell everyone about what they did, think, like, no matter who's listening, and even think about it when they're not online. I'd call those addicts!

On a more serious note, the idea of user personalities is hugely compelling. But the way to organize them, IMHO, is around

--how people communicate (do they talk about themselves, do they like to know who they are talking to, do they like to talk about or with, competitively or consensually),

--how they feel (whether they are sensitive to how they feel online, how they think others see them),

--how they relate (do they get the attention of others because people follow them; because they pay attention to their friends and colleagues, or because they are often group/social participants)

Because blogs, talk tools like twitter, profile-based sites, ratings and review services, mobile and location services, rich media content sites, collaborative writing/editing sites, and commerce/trade sites all offer different ways of engaging. Not all of them require the post-centric contributions covered in this technographic profile survey.

It's a provocative little survey though. And I'm sure there will be some good progress made this year in developing psych profiles for social media users. (I'd share mine right now if they were ready -- but they need more work yet.)

Discover Your Groundswell Social Technographics Profile Your Result: Spectator   Thanks to you, the Collectors, Critics and Creators have an audience. Because you consume the content others produce, marketers try to influence your Groundswell Social Demographic group by reaching the Creators and Critics. With 48% of the US online population, you Spectators represent the largest Groundswell Social Demographics group. Thanks for keeping socialTNT in business :)
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New slideshow on social media user competencies

This slideshow introduces a view of the social media user that emphasizes the sociability, communication, and interaction skills and competencies. In it I make the argument that user experience and interaction designers approach social media with the user's social interests in mind -- and not "needs" and "goals."

I set the user's interest in his or her self image, interest in others, and relational interests. These can be used to build a set of social media competencies, from "telling" about oneself to moderating conversation. Based on social skills but modified to fit the particularities of web and social apps, these competencies might offer a better approach to grasping the user experience than concepts based in a model of user needs.

The big idea here being that social, communicative, and relational "interests" are radically different than the interests based in a cognitive science-based view of the "rational actor." That said, the presentation's light on theory!

A follow-up presentation will look at psychological personalities and propose alternate "personas" for use in social media design.

Downloadable versions of this presentation (keynote, ppt, and pdf), and on slideshare.

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Senior Fellow at SNCR this year!

Hi folks,

I'm pleased to announce that I"ll be a Senior Fellow at the Society for New Communications Research this year!

I'll be focusing on research in a couple areas: social media marketing and advertising, and end user experiences. Both may fuel work in social analytics, contingent on research findings and industry interest.

I'm currently deep in a white paper on the psychology of the user experience of social media and will make it available as soon as I'm finished. It's a deep reading of the encounter users have with the social interface, the many possible interpretations and motivations that comprise user activity, and the core personality types found online. Of everything I've done to date, this one has been the most interesting and I'm looking forward to feedback!

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