Social Interaction Design (SxD) Site Audit

Member trust and system confidence

Social media sites structure the trust users place in each other and in your site or service. For your users to get involved in your site, you must secure their confidence in the site, and facilitate trust among members.

• How much trust does your site require?
• What kind of trust do you establish among members?
• Do you use social networking to create trust?
• How does your site surface trusted content?
• How does it distinguish trusted members?
• What commenting, rating, voting or other social participation schemes have you employed to make trust a visible and reliable feature of your service?

Transactions

Social software sites promote transactions among members. In many cases these transactions are structured around some kind of economy: sharing knowledge, sharing files, voting, inviting, collaborating, and much more. Social media differ from conventional software in that these transactions are ongoing. They belong to communication, and because of this they are open-ended. Social structures organize social interactions, and transactional systems can be designed around a number of common social practices. It is in your interest to design these for compelling and self-sustaining audience participation.

• What do your members exchange with one another?
• What kind of economy organizes these exchanges?
• How do members stand out?
• How do members give and take, and what do they give and take?
• What kinds of transactions occur directly between members?
• What kinds of transactions are conducted "in front" of all members? Groups? Friend networks?
• How do you use community policing or normative reinforcement to enable self-sustaining and self-organizing user behaviors?
• What token gestures (such as winks, favoriting, hotlisting, compliments) are available to you for the purpose of cementing transactions and their cultural economies and social practices?

Distribution

Increasing numbers of social media companies are modularizing their services and making available through widgets and badges. These make it simpler and faster to engage in social practices with friends and audiences, and are a lighter mode of producing social media and user-generated content than the full-on walled-city approach.

• Do you export your content to badges?
• Do you use widgets to parcel out small and familiar kinds of social interactions?
• Could your content or users be of value to third party sites or services?
• If so, how might widgets be used to accomplish this?