Design for Social Sharing Workshop

Design for Social Sharing Workshop -some theory, a casestudy and a design exercise Rashmi Sinha www.slideshare.net www.rashmisinha.com

Structure of talk

Why now?

Understanding crowds

Design for Social Sharing

Some design principles

Case Study: SlideShare

Design exercise

Part I: Why NOW?

browsing alone Attributed to PIMboula on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pimboula/15256153/

Who is online

Broadband penetration is at more than 50%

From Pew Internet Research, for US only

Just for fun! 34% men , 26% women 37% of 18-29 yrs old , and 20% of 65 and over go online, on any given day, just for fun… From Pew Internet Research, for US only

6.5 million people

WOW is millions of people with diverse backgrounds collaborating, socializing, and learning while having fun. It represents the future of real-time collaborative teams in an always-on, diversity-intensive, real-time environment. WOW is a glimpse into our future. Joi Ito in Wired Magazine

240,000 users

Wells Fargo StageCoach Island

American Apparel

Part II Social presence (integration of GTalk with Gmail) Real time collaboration with text documents

DiggSpy: real time updating

Structure of talk

Why now?

Design exercise

Part II: Understanding crowds

Designing for the individual

Usability

Findability

Interactions and their flow

…

Designing for the group

How people interact

Rules for interaction

Product of interaction

A community

A joint decision

Working together

Psychology of groups

Social facilitation

Group think

Group polarization

Social loafing

Conditions for wise crowds

Cognitive Diversity

Independence

Decentralization

Easy Aggregation

Wise Crowds: Cognitive Diversity

Need many perspectives for good answers

Groups become homogenous

New (similar) members don’t bring new info

Diversity reduces groupthink

Groupthink works by shielding members from outside opinions

Diversity reduces conformity

Wise Crowds: Independence

Stops people’s mistakes from getting correlated (uncorrelated mistakes averaged out)

Encourages new viewpoints (diversity)

Concept of Social Proof

Milgram experiment

People assume that groups know what they are doing

Leads to herd like behavior

Information Cascades

Sequence of uninformed choices, building upon each other

Wise Crowds: Decentralization “ A crowd of decentralized people working to solve a problem on their own without any central effort to guide them, come up with better solutions, rather than a top-down driven solution.” Suroweicki

Wise Crowds: Easy Aggregation

A decentralized system can pick right solution

With easy way for information to be aggregated across system

Example: votes on Digg

Crowds in Online Games

Alone together (Ducheneaut et al. CHI 2006)

Passive presence of others

Playing for the audience, but not interacting

Social facilitation (Zajonc, 1960)

Improved performance in presence of others

Presence can be passive

Observed even in cockroaches!

A different type of social factor

“ … the other players have important roles beyond … quest groups: they also provide an audience , a sense of social presence , and a spectacle ”

Ducheneaut et al., 2006

“ playing WoW is therefore like playing pinball in a crowded arcade, where spectators gather around the machine to observe the best players ”

“ Community in MMORPGs tends refer to mythical old villages where everybody knows and interacts with everybody… as WoW illustrates, a large community of gamers can thrive in a context where relationships are much more indirect”

Structure of talk

Why now?

Design exercise

Part III: So you want to design for social sharing?

Forget the ipod!

Give up control This is messy!

Beyond hand-crafted IA

Plant the seeds, let people connect

Design for emergent architecture

What is social sharing?

This is not it!

Hi I found you while I was searching my network at LinkedIn. Let's connect directly, so we can help each other with referrals. If we connect, both of our networks will grow. To add me as your connection, just follow the link below.

First generation Social Networks (Friendster, LinkedIn…) 1) I am linked to -> -> to you --->You are linked to her -> ---> on…

How it works

People connect to each other

Six degrees of separation

“ Are you my friend” type of awkwardness

Object mediated social networks “… call for the rethinking of sociality along lines that include objects in the concept of social relations.” Katrin-Knorr Cetina Reference: http://www.zengestrom.com/blog/2005/04/why_some_social.html

Coffee Dance performance Tomatoes

Second generation social networks

Put objects at the center

Social sharing

Tagging

Viral sharing

Social News Creation

Watercooler conversations around our stuff (social networks with objects in between) e.g., Flickr, Yahoo answers 1) I share my pics -> -> with you ---> -->You share your pics -> ---> with him

How it works

People share objects | watch others

Connections through objects

Social info streams: emergence of popular, interesting items

Viral sharing (passing on interesting stuff, e.g., YouTube videos)

How it works

Individual to individual to individual

Popularity based navigation track “viral” items

1) I send video I like -> -> to you. You pass on --> --> to her, who sends on to her, who passes on…

Tag-based social sharing (linked by concepts…) e.g., Flickr, del.icio.us 1) I tag my bookmarks -> you see my tags -->You share your tags ->

How it works

Saving & tagging your stuff (creating bookmarks).

Tags mediate social connections

Formation of social/conceptual information streams. Emergence of popular, interesting items

politics lebanon Global voices politics technology Global voices web JAVA CNN networks blogs science science science brain

Social news creation (rating news stories) e.g., digg, Newsvine 1) I find interesting story -> you rate story -->Others rate stories

How it works

Finding and rating stories

Popular stories rise to top

5 4

Objects invite us to

Connect

Play

React

Reach out

Part IV: Some principles…

1. Make system personally useful

For end-user system should have strong personal use

Memorable Personal Snippets (e.g., Del.icio.us & Flickr)

Self-expression (e.g., Newsvine)

Social status: Digg

Don’t count on altruism

System should thrive on people’s selfishness

Bite-sized self-expression

Creative self-expression

Artistic expression (Flickr, YouTube)

Humor (YouTube)

Individual piece should be small

Can create sets & lists

Do Mashups

Simple, guessable URLs for everything

Leave room for games & social play

Appreciation

Stalking (some!)

Gossip

2. Symbiotic relationship between personal & social

Personal snippets > Social stream

Pictures > Organized by Events

Music > Organized by Playlists

3. Porous boundary between public & private

Earlier systems

Personal (Personal Desktop Software, e.g., Picasa, EndNote)

OR Social websites (Shutterfly)

Rethink public & private

People share for the right returns

Set defaults to public, allow easy change to private

Give user control

Over individual pieces & sets

Delete items from history

Reset /remove profile

Privacy settings on Flickr

4. Allow for levels of participation

Everyone does not need to create!

Implicit creation (creating by consuming)

Remixing—adding value to others’ content

Source: Bradley Horowitz’s weblog, Elatable, Feb. 17, 2006, “Creators, Synthesizers, and Consumers”

Why do people digg/comment/tag? “ commenting, digging, burying comments, typing descriptions, reading hundreds of articles and… … for a lot of nerds, using digg is just a casual free-time activity. Entertaining. Fun. Engaging.”

How to encourage participation

Insights from Social Psychology

Highlight unique contribution

Allow for smaller local groups

Highlight benefit to self

Highlight benefit to group

Source: Using social psychology to motivate contributions to online communities, Ling et al. 2005

5. Let people feel the presence of others

What paths are well worn

User profiles / photos

Real-time updating

Like a conversation

Sense that others are out there

What people are digging right now!

6. And yet, moments of Independence…

Choreography: when alone, when part of group

Prevent mobs

Don’t make it too easy to mimic others

Incentives for originality & uniqueness

Allow for alternative viewpoints

Social sharing can lead to tyranny of dominant view

People of a group agree

Viewpoint rises to top (popularity lists, tag clouds)

7. Enable Serendipity

Don’t make navigation all about popularity

Access to some popular stuff (keep this fast moving)

Make the “long tail” accessible

Popularity as a jump off point to other ways of exploring

Provide personalization

Recommendations using collaborative filtering

Similar tags, content, others

Ad-hoc groups?

8. Most of all, allow for play

Challenges with social systems

Systems represent people who adopt them

Many social sites dominated by relatively few users

Systems represent their viewpoints & perspective

Types of biases

In-groups / experts use more specific tags than out-groups / novices

Surfacing minority perspectives

Minority views get lost. Consensus view bubbles up

How to give alternative viewpoints a voice?

How to surface expertise?

People can gain expertise within system

How to reflect outside expertise?

Weigh it differently?

Adoption by average user

People just want info, don’t want to participate

Structure of talk

Why now?

Design exercise

The object of sharing

The digital representation

Social practices around sharing

Mirroring them on SlideShare

Models of popularity based navigation

Single, simple metric (e.g., Digg)

Focuses driving stories up/down in short period

Single Complex metric (e.g., Flickr)

Multiple Simple Metrics (e.g., YouTube)

Let people decide which makes sense

Different metrics reflect diff qualities

Popularity based Navigation How many of these is too much? Remember stuff Tagging Share with your friends Emailing Share on your blog Embedding Watch it Viewing Decide what goes to front page Digging Interact with others Commenting Remember stuff Show others what you like Favoriting Goal Metric

Tagging on SlideShare