In order to proceed now with these examples, we need to develop our framework further to account for and describe what’s on the screen in terms of individual user experiences and aggregate social practices. We will do this on the basis of the social action systems touched on above. We will structure these social action systems into forms. While an imperfect term, “form” conveys the degree of structure and organization as well as materiality we are looking for. “Frames” could work also, or possibly “formats” — but both of those terms carry other connotations. Frames are used mostly with “perspectives” of experience; and formats for visual treatments or media forms. Our forms of social action will be user-centric, in that they will start from user activity and behavior, but will accommodate the resulting production of social content also. These forms will combine social media acts, actions, and activities, and provide us with an interpretive schema layered on top of conventional interface and design frameworks. Forms support the two major types of social action, but are material technical implementations, and so require slightly different treatment. They have a several components, including: visual, functional, temporal, and content components. (Note that forms do not describe user intentions or motives—those require a psychological framework for user behaviors. The psychology of social media use practices will describe what users “think” is going on; forms will describe what we think is going on.) … »

Let’s now take some examples of how social action systems describe the user and social interactions on social media. Because there are so many different kinds of applications out there, we will look at just one kind of social media application. We will take those that have attracted the most attention this year: feed, status, “micro-blogging,” and lifestreaming applications. These would include Facebook (although Facebook is also a social networking site), Twitter, Seesmic, Jaiku, Pownce, Dipity, Swurl, Tumblr, Soup.io, Dopplr, Friendfeed, Storyt.lr, Spokeo, and others). They include also the applications that interface with Twitter (Tweetdeck, Twhirl, etc.), and those that aggregate feeds as customized RSS readers (designed to simplify blog tracking, friend tracking, etc.).
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We need an action system for our content/information system. Action systems traditionally belong to interaction designers, and they tend to describe actions that are constrained and enabled by the user interface, as well as back-end architecture, features, and functionality. Action systems conventionally hew pretty closely to visual design languages, and there are many standard and conventional systems (including pattern languages) around for user behavior around UI elements, such as pulldowns, lists, multiple selection windows, form pages, wizards, and so on. Action systems describe the user interaction with what is on the screen, and with what the user’s (inter)action does: search > results; submit > preview; mouse over > popup, and so on. The screen can only display so much, so once a user begins to interact, her actions result in new content, windows, screens and so on. … »

A few months ago my Social Interaction Design Primer was published on Johnny (check it out). In this primer I tried to create a solid ground for social interaction design. Since then I’ve thought, read and discussed a lot… which caused me to write this follow up, which is somewhat longer. So in the next week I will publish it in parts (five in total). Sit back and read my thoughts on why social interaction design should be taken serious. … »

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.. … »

The defining characteristic of social media is a revolutionary undermining of the distinction between producers and consumers of media. Instead of producing content, social media services merely facilitate user interaction. Given this, one would have thought that the tenets of User-Centred Design (UCD) would be highly pertinent to the design of social media. In fact it is very difficult to find a major social media service which was created via a genuine UCD process (almost as difficult as finding an interaction designer who does not wax lyrical about the importance of UCD). Blogger, craigslist, Delicious, eBay, Facebook, Flickr, Gaia Online, Last.fm, LiveJournal, Skype, Wikipedia: none of these pioneering legends of social media were born out of the ethnographic observation techniques, ‘personas’, ’scenarios’, low-fidelity prototyping or constant pre-development testing that characterise UCD. Why don’t UCD techniques seem to be necessary for the creation of great social media? I propose five main reasons, not all of which are peculiar to social media. … »

Like many of you, I simply can’t keep up with the river of lifestreaming applications hitting public beta this year. Many seem to simply do the same thing, more or less, with a bit more of this or a bit more of that to differentiate each from its competitors. But social apps are bound, perhaps more even than “conventional” software, to conform to best practices. Why? Because they are social applications. Social applications succeed only if they can extend the individual user experience out into new and interesting social experiences. … »

Current business conditions are unforgiving, and seem to be taking their toll on the social media industry, whether it’s in the mood on Sand Hill, in the decline of online advertising, or even in the prognosis for Web 2.0 at large. I’d like to attempt to capture the basics of social media user experience. For the business all of us are in, at the end of the day, hangs on the participation of users. … »