One of my favorite books about community is a work by Nobel Prize winner Elias Canetti called Crowds and Power. It’s a beautiful and thoroughly insightful study on people assembled in different ways and for a kaleidoscopic set of reasons. I turn to the book often when thinking about how social media both separate and connect us, using it as an imaginary frontier of sorts for what mediated crowds might or could do. … »

I started wondering last evening what twitter would be like if in addition to followers we could also see who was actually being paid attention to. The groups many of us use in clients like Tweetdeck or Seesmic, for example. So in the midst all of our positive talk of transparency and authenticity, I found myself chuckling at the opacity we in fact rely on to make it through the day. … »

Although social networking sites have become the commonplace over the past eight years since the introduction of Friendster in 2002, designers have not yet explored two important notions: 1) What kind of social experience do social networking sites foster?; and 2) Do social networking sites encourage community? … »

Incentives are a commonplace to game designers and developers. They are a means of designing activity to support goals and to motivate users. They are not events, which are those things that happen during game play and to which which users must react. We tend to think of incentives as those design elements that draw out, or appeal to a user’s interests, reasons, and motives. Design aspects that the user can anticipate, expect, and organize his or her activities around. We think of incentives as designed into a game, site, or service. But they are really, actually, in the user. They work because they incent (incentivize) the user’s incentives. … »

Alfred Hitchcock used to say that he never made a “Whodunnit” movie. His movies were “For whom was it done?” In fact a lot of his movies begin with the crime. In some, the victim of the crime turns out to be the criminal himself. What does this have to do with Johnny Holland and experience design? Let’s find out. … »

Some time ago I was thinking about an essay Michel Foucault once wrote about two competing concepts of the Self in major world religions. In this essay he compared two views of the Self: the Self that is discovered and known through some kind of religious quest and search. And the Self that is created, invented, through free will, action, choice (and so on). What if we would apply his view on today’s social media? … »

Everybody hase very different experiences of social media: in our sense of connectedness, visibility, popularity, in what we think it is for and why we use it. These differences ought to matter not only to any user experience or interaction designer, but to any business interested in commercializing or profiting from social media. I’ve attempted to catch these differences in personality and put them in a slideshow. These personality types are an attempt to distill out just some of the different user experiences had on social media into personality types.. … »