The conversation was really stimulating, and wound in and out of perspectives about social interaction design (sxd). At first we were discussing Google Wave’s demise and Google’s inherent lack of social understanding, and then moved onto Facebook missing the mark with Facebook Questions. My take on this is that Facebook already has users asking and answering each other’s questions every day — and effectively at that — but in their status messages. What Questions appears to accomplish with its wide open format is merely to generate data for some presumed search platform later. I’m not convinced the data will be any better than Yahoo! Answers, and, as users, we’re certainly not compelled to answer (or read) questions by people who aren’t in our friend group. It’s the chicken and egg problem if Facebook wants to grow their database to search on later; so a better strategy, in my mind, would be to target questions to the right friend groups. Context matters.

This brought us to a discussion about fundamental differences in the way Twitter and Facebook are designed. Facebook is a network where relations are the social object; while Twitter is a network where information is the social object (although emotion and play are also social objects at times). Yet, with all of Twitter’s openness, it brings with it a sense of presence of who you’re talking to. It doesn’t feel like you’re tweeting into a void, whereas using Facebook Questions does. We also discussed, here, that relationships that form around content sharing (e.g., Twitter) develop into the sort of network where this openness can be supported. But privacy still reigns in the Facebook networks where the only glue is, in many cases, a former relationship.

Of course, this led to asking whether there are rules for designing effective social interactions. The short of it is no. Twitter created a versatile platform by using only simple rules for engagement. But these rules cannot be carbon copied, replicated elsewhere, and expected to work in another system in quite the same way. Things like context, culture, and personalities (among other sxd considerations) change the way a given feature will be used and adopted by the community.

Instead of developing rules or principles of social interaction, a better approach is to think of the questions we can ask when designing for social. Who are our users? How do they think of themselves? Who do they want to connect to? Who do they want to connect to tomorrow? Why? What’s the point of the network in the first place? Where are they when they’re using the network? What is the outcome of an interaction? What’s the role of strong versus weak ties in the network?

We didn’t have any glorious resolution to our discussion but instead emphasized how we need to keep trying to understand how social interactions play out — which includes doing research into social and developing case studies which illustrate principles that we can take to our clients and product teams.

A few references related to social interaction design include:

• Adrian Chan’s original introduction to Social Interaction Design. And related presentations.
• Paul Adam’s research into Real Life Social Networks.
• A great list of references by Paul for thinking about sxd.
• David Casali’s Social Usability checklist.
• A case study by us fine folks at Bolt | Peters about iPad usability and how social and context play a part.
• Our group blog on social interaction design.
• My article on using remote research to inform social interaction design. And a related talk.

I am honored to be a judge and advisor to this little product of ours, and I must admit I was skeptical we’d get such great community submissions from our call-to-action on jovoto!

Now, I didn’t feel like we had any one blow-away submission that by itself would address the paper cup waste problem. But the submissions were clustered in certain theme areas, that — if combined — might really start to make a difference, not just with reducing paper cup waste, but also with visibility into sustainability issues more broadly. Which was a goal of the project all along!

Plus, there were 400+ submissions on jovoto from people all over the world! How did our modest project garner such attention and concern from the community? I’m quite impressed, not only by the quality of the submissions but also by jovoto as a platform.

So, here’s how I saw the submissions clustering around a few themes:

• Change the cup, not people’s behavior. We know that people get stuck in habits that are hard to break or unrealistic to try to change. So one solution is to let people keep doing what they do, but solve the paper cup waste problem along the way. To me, the best way to do this is through affordable biodegradable cups (period) — not through a redesigned travel mug.
• Incentivize people to bring their own mug. Part of the reason we’re having this design challenge is that people forget to bring travel mugs with them for to-go coffee.
• Encourage people to purchase drinks “for here”. The idea here is to reduce waste by using ceramic mugs at coffee shops — but I don’t believe this will work at scale, especially with people’s hectic, rushed, multitasking lives. Sadly, we drink our coffee t0-go.
• Move to a borrow and deposit model. This was a popular theme — that we could borrow a reusable mug from one shop, carry it with us, and return it to another shop when we’re done.
• Provide smart rewards card (e.g., embedded in RFID chips, bar codes). We’re adding technology to all other parts of our lives — why not to our coffee too? But really, the idea here is that we incentivize people to move to a different model of to-go coffee if, say, the cup remembered your favorite drink, had your debit card, and automatically “punched” your reward card. And maybe tweeted and checked you into Foursquare on your behalf too!
• Share the community’s behavior publicly. This could be done by creating some visual of how other people in the community are contributing to less waste (from an art installation to a chalkboard with a tally of paper cups saved per day). Another interesting idea was one where your free coffee comes after 10 other people have brought travel mugs with them today. So you benefit from the community’s good behavior — in a pay-it-forward model.

And from all these awesome ideas I had to vote on my top three! It was a difficult task, but I was looking for solutions that would work across coffee purveyors (e.g., not just for Starbucks), for a wide audience of people with different backgrounds and daily habits, and that would encourage sustainable behavior beyond just coffee drinking (like through providing visibility into community efforts to recycle, reduce, reuse.)

I was just one judge among many (about 15-20), but altogether I feel good that we decided on winners that captured the spirit of the contest. The winners will be announced at our awards ceremony in NYC on Thursday, June 17 at 3:00 EST (21:00 CEST). Join us live at http://bit.ly/betacuplive where we’ll be announcing:

• the top 5 ideas as selected by the community
• the top submissions and overall winner as selected by our jury

As always, thanks for your support and, please, drink sustainably!

But for now, you can read the article in UX Magazine. Or the brief write-up by ZDNet. Or watch the video we created:

And here’s a look at mobile payment transactions (using Square) on the iPhone versus the iPad:

I can see both sides of the issue, so I decided to draw a comic: Facebook vs. Everyone.
In it, basically General Zuckerberg is saying: “patience, my children”, and the mob is doing what mobs do — complain, gossip, and play Farmville!

is where my comics live!

#1: Yosemite is merely a visual journal for a weekend I spent in Yosemite with my boyfriend, sister, and brother-in-law. Some funny thing seemed to happen to everyone (though some might argue except me).

#2: Toy Exchange was drawn at IA Summit 2010 as a submission to the Mad*Pow challenge to design sustainable toys. The video blurb about my submission is also up!

#3: Name Tag is a comic rendition of a hilarious rant by Carolyn Snyder at IA Summit 2010 about the terrible usability of our name badges.

#4: Carpe Diem was (almost) a single frame comic. I really just did this one for fun!

  is where my comics live!

How do you research how the unemployed find jobs? Surely they use their social networks. How do you research how to financial investors get advice from their community? How do you research consumer coffee drinking culture? How do you research how people shop for clothes? Shopping is one of the most social activities, even if it’s done alone. In fact the most social shoppers are elderly women: they shop with their deceased husbands in mind (“What would he have liked?”) and with their children in mind (“If I buy the cheaper shirt, I’ll have more to pass on to my daughter.”) But shopping for a dress might take several days to weeks before the purchase is actually made. What goes on in that time?

Okay, those are what I was referring to as “social design problems”. But what I care about is how we design for those things? I know very little about financial planners make decisions. I know my coffee drinking habits — but do I know yours? What about your shopping habits? Research is necessary to uncover all the nuances in our social behaviors, and is especially important to do right when working on such social design problems.

But how? Our user research methods have been fine tuned over the past decade so that we know exactly how to recruit the right sample, how to ask the right questions, and how many users to talk to to unveil most usability issues in an interface. I just don’t believe that we have the right methods yet for social interaction design issues.

How do we study a community that spans the online and offline world? How do we capture emotions, feelings, expectations, and privacy issues without biased research prompts. How do we understand social context?

I am not convinced that 5 users is enough for social interaction design issues — or for studying social interfaces. There are too many variations in people’s social behavior to capture everything in small samples. There are too many social contexts in which even the same user would respond differently. How many users is necessary? What is the best way to complement data metrics (quants) with qualitative user behavior?

I have been talking to several people about this recently and would love to hear from you. What social research methods do you use? How do you use them and what benefits do they provide? If you’re willing to share your methods, I am interested in collaborating with you to create a set of best practices here!

They were building upon (among other things) my work on asking and answering behavior on social networks (“Do your friends make you smarter“) and wanted to know more details about things like: why do people post questions, answer questions, and what motivates people to go the social search route over traditional search.

I want to talk about their conclusion here first: where they discuss the tradeoffs between using social networks and search engines. This was the most interesting part of the paper and is the part that has the most practical take-aways for the UX community.

Basically, for questions requiring trustful and personalized responses like for recommendations or opinions, social networks were strongly preferred over search engines. People occasionally perceived a delay in response time (but sometimes did not!) — and either way, this delay was not a downer since it saved people the effort of making multiple attempts on a search engine before getting the right answer back (if they ever did). Also, subjective questions got faster responses on social networks than objective questions!

Additionally, they talk about how being on social networks is fun for people. It’s too bad that they under-emphasize this point because it’s really important from a social interaction design perspective! People engage on social networks because it’s fun! There’s an emotional tie to the community that keeps bringing them back. When it comes time to ask a question, people turn to their friends for help because it keeps them connected with others, helps them to share information about themselves, and keeps them engaged in their community. Fun is an important element of design — and until Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft, or other search providers make the information seeking part fun, they will lose. It’s not enough to simply pipe in real-time Twitter results and expect that to be fun or more personalized!

That (above) is the juiciest part of the paper, but I do summarize the whole paper below for other nuggets of inspiration.

To start, the authors note that Q-A on social networks is unique (like unique from Q&A sites like Yahoo Answers) because:

• questions are posted with true identities (rarely anonymously)
• people’s audience is smaller (being only people’s direct contacts, or possibly friends-of-friends)
• status messages are short: so questions are succinct

Then they collected surveys from 624 Microsoft employees (1/4 were female) about their Q-A behavior on Facebook and Twitter mostly. The survey asked about:

Asking questions:

• whether they ever used their status messages to ask questions
• if yes, to share a recent example of a question they asked
• what kind of responses they received
• how often they logged onto social networking sites

And answering questions:

• whether they responded to someone else’s question (from a status update)
• if yes, to share a recent example of a question they answered

50% of people who replied to the survey did indeed use their status messages to ask questions! Sometimes they were silly questions (“Why are men so stupid?”) and sometimes they were serious (“Point and shoot camera just died — need to replace it asap. What should I buy? Think under $200″).

On asking questions

Questions took many shapes and forms. Some were targeted to “Anyone” in the social network; others were general statements put out to the network to interpret. Most questions were asking about recommendations (29%) or opinions (22%). Some were about facts (17%) and some were rhetorical (14%).

Questions also related to everything from technology (29%) to entertainment (17%), places (8%), current events (5%), and ethics and philosophy (2%). People said they’d generally avoid asking their network about topics like health, pornography, religion, and financial issues because those are too personal.

Another finding was that Twitter users were more likely to ask questions about technology, while Facebook users more likely to ask about home and family issues. This isn’t too surprising, but does show that the makeup of people’s networks affects what kinds of questions people will ask.

One looming question in this research is: why do people choose to ask their friends over searching on Google? In this study, people reported having more trust in their friends’ responses or that they thought traditional search wouldn’t work for them with this particular question. Sometimes it was obvious that their friends would know their history, family situation, and other preferences better than a search engine.

People also generally knew the makeup of their networks (meaning they could get targeted responses) and people wanted to advertise their current interests by way of asking questions of their friends.

What about answer speed or answer quality? There were mixed results, but often questions asked on social networks were not urgent so any delay was considered acceptable. It was also easier than sorting through tons of results on search engines and quite often more fun to engage with friends.

On answering questions

Almost everyone has answered a question on one occasion or another. And of the questions offered up in this survey — nearly every one received an answer! That’s kind of amazing considering Q-A sites in general have a much lower response rate, but it’s also likely due to the intimate make up of people’s social networks. Not to be an under-appreciated finding in this paper, however!

About one-quarter of questions got an answer in 30 minutes or less, and 90% were answered within one day. (I’d LOVE to see how Aardvark’s data compares here. I have several questions out to Aardvark that have never been answered; but of the ones that do get answered, it’s typically faster than 30 minutes.)

Yet people don’t seemed to be bothered by the 1-day response lag. Perhaps this is because replies from trustworthy friends are more valuable than junk search engine or Yahoo Answers responses?

Why did people respond to questions by others? Most often they were just trying to be helpful (37%) or had expertise in the area (32%). Those seem like good reasons to me, and ones that are often overlooked when thinking about how valuable personal social networks can be to people. At other times, people replied because they had a good relationship with the asker, were connected socially, or had some notion of social currency (that answering now may result in a favor later).

When people didn’t respond to questions by others, it was mostly because they didn’t know the answer! That’s pretty neat. But some said they’d prefer a personal request and ignored questions that were asked to the network as a whole. In fact, my research on Q-A in social networks revealed the very same thing — that people gave great responses when asked privately or one-on-one, even when they weren’t very knowledgeable about the topic.

Another interesting, but not very surprising finding, is that people who were more frequent social networks users received quicker responses! Why duh! People who are engaged with their communities have developed rapports and back-and-forths and social capital with folks — what goes around comes around. But it is cool to see this intuition confirmed in real data!

Unfortunately, this paper is weak on design recommendations. My colleagues and I have already suggested the very same ideas (e.g., surface your friends status messages on the results page — what I call “friend-filtered search” — or have a search engine post a question as a status message on your behalf.) Even as I say this, there are serious social interaction design issues with this approach. Expectations about search engine behavior, expectations about social network intrusion, privacy (obviously), interactions with online agents, etc. all come into play. I very much hope that these issues are being considered by the big search engine companies, but somehow I’m afraid they’re not.

Detailed information and registration can be found here: http://socialsear.ch

Why Enterprise Social Search?

Knowledge management and information retrieval in large organizations is a huge problem. A number of orgs are making efforts to address these issues; and leveraging social data — or information that people within the company hold — is one promising route.

Why a design workshop?

Although the premise of our workshop is social search in the enterprise, we won’t be satisfied by just writing or thinking about it. We want to bring together the sharpest minds in the enterprise world and mix them with designers, researchers, and IT professionals to come up with some practical solutions that actually could be implemented.

What next?

After our workshop in San Francisco, we’ll take our findings and carry them onto future workshops in Australia and Washington DC — to build upon our ideas and find ways to develop them even further.

Where can I learn more?

You can read more about who we are and what the workshop will entail over at http://socialsear.ch.

Also don’t miss…

…this presentation that we gave at the Enterprise Search Summit last Fall. This presentation gives a flavor of that topics that will be covered in our Enterprise Social Search Design Workshop in San Francisco.

We hope to see you at the workshop!

If I could summarize the workshop in one sentence, it would be: “Don’t design for users’ needs on one website, design for the experience customers expect to have.“

Now, that’s actually what designers should always strive for. And it gets complicated in large organizations where marketing, product, executives, and designers don’t necessarily all work together.

So it’s important — albeit challenging —  to design across channels. People are leading multi-track lives these days and our experiences span across spaces and mediums. College kids prefer to receive a text message than an email…we visit a new city and have to navigate signage, paper maps, word-of-mouth information, iPhone directions, etc…so many touch points (pain points!) while traveling to the airport and taking a flight.

At REI, for example, customers research online but buy in the store (for bikes), but often research and purchase tents both online. Strategies (or user needs) are different for different products! But to customers, they just care about their experience purchasing gear with REI — whether it’s online or in the store.

Why do we need to sell multi-channel design? Practitioners aren’t thinking enough about designing for holistic experiences, but people’s experiences are always holistic. Also, marketers are way ahead of us! (Only 4 out of ~80 people at Adaptive Path’s Managing Experience conference raised their hand saying that system design was something they thought about or practiced.)

Multi-channel design requires full company buy-in. Executives need to be on board. Designers need to understand the organizational structure, executives’ perspectives, the business goals — and importantly, how things actually get done in the company. UX here needs to work both top-down and bottom-up. REI’s got a new mandate: “Transform the Customer Experience” which was delivered from the higher-ups. This changes how everyone approaches their work.

Mid-morning we went on a field trip to understand how the Hyatt Regency hotel deals with customer service. My group looked at front desk interactions, but other groups went to the restaurant services and meeting services place. We asked a lot of questions. Took a lot of notes. Drew a bunch of pictures.

Then we came back and did a customer journey mapping exercise, where we thought about all the touch points for different services. For example, for front desk check-in, touch points include: face-to-face, web, TV, email, kiosk, phone, and physical space (lobby). An experienced business traveler might flow through this system like this:

The next exercise involved Business Origami! The point was to map out spheres of interaction for the check-in process.

This was really fun because it got us thinking about all the players in the system (not just the agent & the guest). Of course, we started by thinking about the front-desk interaction, but increasingly drew out more and more spheres that all played into this one interaction. All the training and support the agent has…the immediate Hyatt chain…Hyatt corp…but also the whole sphere of the business man’s life.

We learned that this is a method of doing “service blueprinting” where you have to think about all the physical actions, guest actions, customer-facing actions, back-stage actions (like training), etc.

Finally we talked about some tips for building good experiences across multiple touch points. On websites, you have to consider how every single page looks because lots of users will come into your site via Google (e.g., through a “back door”). So on every page, every touchpoint, you have to:

• be consistent
• use the same information
• and reinforce your brand everywhere.

Designing holistic experiences also means listening holistically:

• the usual UX research, along with:
• call center
• social media
• sentiment analysis
• market research
• analytics
• store follows/shop alongs
• email queries and feedback

And finally, make new friends (marketing, finance, distribution center, packaging, different industries); wander the halls; get out of your comfort zone and have new experiences. This will give you perspectives on customer experiences that you wouldn’t otherwise glean.

This is a quick plea for your help and attention. My sister and her husband — first time homebuyers — are on the brink of losing the house they have a winning bid on and are totally on track to close on April 14. EXCEPT that they cannot get the flood insurance they need for the loan because Congress went on Easter Recess!