Adrian Chan is a leading thinker of social media and social software design, a field he has coined "social interaction design." He consults to Web 2.0 companies as well as those seeking to implement Web 2.0 strategies. As a past web developer and current specialist in the niche of social software and the unique social practices that make it work, he steers clients towards execution that satisfies their business and marketing interests and away from some of the potential pitfalls of user generated content engagement.
His social interaction design approach is a unique blend of conventional design methodologies and social theories. His aim is to facilitate a critical understanding of what might be called the "social interface:" the tendency of individual user interactions on a social web application to produce emergent social phenomena. His approach seeks to account for the intended and unintended consequences of social media and web 2.0 design, for which social theory and psychology provide useful conceptual guidance. He is a keen observer of social interactions (online and off) and a long-time student of the psychological and personal interests that motivate social action and communication.
Adrian believes that the success of any social media investment, be it a themed online community, a mobile application, a widget or facebook application, depends less on meeting conventional definitions of user needs and goals and more on structuring self-reproducing and self-sustaining social practices. By this account, social media can succeed even by failing — and in fact many sites can claim high rates of participation even though their design, architecture, navigation and functionality may be wanting. Insofar as content on these sites is contributed by users in real or possible relationships with one another, the strategic and design goal is communication among users. And users will communicate as much, if not sometimes more, when the poverty of design is outdone by the personal and social practices that compel participation.
In the case of social media, meeting business and strategic goals presents a unique challenge to internet professionals. The social objectives of the company providing the service may not reflect the interests of users, and so practices want to be structured so as to produce content as a result of interaction frameworks and social organization that may have very different organizing principles. Getting there requires knowledge of the personal and social dimensions of the user experience.
To date the industry has cemented the potential of social media, but is still only beginning to identify these new forms of mediated interaction and communication. Common site features include blogs and comments, reviews, ratings and votes, tags and folksonomic navigation, questions/answers, recommendations, lists, favorites, and now social games, use of rich media, presence tools, and mobile presencing and social apps. As these online routines become standard practice, increasingly structured, hierarchized, and complex practices will emerge to take advantage of technology's enormous capacity to surface connections, to quantify and compare, value, to link and relate, and of course mine its own growing field of data. All of these will take shape in the form of a social marketplace rich in data on what people do, with whom, what they like, respond to, and communicate about. While companies cannot control or even regulate users and uses, with the help of social interaction design approach, they can anticipate and influence outcomes. And as mass media continue to lose ground to social media, anticipating variations in social practices will become mission critical.
Adrian Chan works as Gravity7, a web 2.0 and social interaction design consultancy offering best practices applications of UI, UX, and interaction design solutions for social software and social media startups, online communities, user-generated content sites and more. He is based in San Francisco, California.
Call 415 516 4442 or adrian | at | gravity7 | dot | com
© 2007 by Adrian Chan. All Rights Reserved.
