Adrian, Thanks for your post and link to a thoughtful article.
In some respects, the idea of SxD reminds me of the beginnings of the web, when IA was touted as a new field that reflected the unique aspects of design for this new medium. But those of us who had been doing IxD before the web realized that this was not really the case: designing for the web had unique constraints due to available technology: our prediction was that as web technology improved, IA and IxD would become nearly indistinguishable, which is close to where we are now. So what of SxD? Well, I have to admit that, like Juan, I am skeptical of most of the differences you seek to draw. The methods and principles of IxD discussed in About Face and other volumes hold up, I believe, quite well in social software contexts, assuming that you understand the user behaviors and motivations. The challenges of identifying user behavior patterns (personas) for consumer social networking applications are the same as those for any consumer software: behavior is dictated by lifestlye choices, which can be difficult to nail down compared to enterprise applications, where business roles are usually well-defined and user behaviors have a relatively close mapping to them. That said, your observations about Facebook behavior patterns are quite interesting, and highlight something that may be unique about social networking applications: significant usage patterns may perhaps be described almost mathematically by the relationships between nodes in the network. Clay Shirky described this for blogs years ago in this article: http://shirky.com/writings/powerlaw_weblog.html His observation is basically that connections in the network determine blog site "behavior" and influence in the blogosphere. When blogs attract large numbers of incoming links, the nature of those blogs tends to change to that of a broadcast medium. Blogs with low numbers of incoming links remain more conversational. I think this basic idea can be generalized to all social networks: there seem to be 3 basic states for a node in a social network as defined by its connectivity: it can have many more incoming connections than outgoing, many more outgoing than incoming, or roughly equal incoming and outgoing connections. In addition, there is a continuum of total connections, from few to many. Applying this to your Facebook example, your self-oriented users would have more incoming connections (viewers) than outgoing. Your other-oriented would have the reverse; they would primarily be viewing/touching other nodes. Your relation-oriented would have roughly equally interactions with others. I think that the differences in connection volumes may be another interesting dimension for you to explore there in term of behaviors and motivations. To me this is all fascinating because of the possibility of intuiting a set of behavior patterns from what amounts to a mathematical model, which is obviously not a typical approach to persona creation. Of course, while it may describe WHAT people are doing, it doesn't detail WHY, which is where qualitiative user research and more typical persona development would come into the picture. So, my conclusion? Social networks are interesting because some of the behavior of the system is dependent on the topology of the network. That is certainly a difference from unitary application design, but is it enough to call SxD its own field? I'm not certain, but I don't think so. But it is at the very least an area of IxD that is ripe for exploration. Robert. Robert Reimann IxDA Seattle Associate Creative Director frog design Seattle, WA On Tue, Oct 14, 2008 at 5:22 PM, adrian chan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Folks, > > It's been a long while since I posted here, but wanted to solicit feedback > on this brief intro to Social Interaction Design (design for social media) > > > http://www.gravity7.com/blog/media/2008/10/social-interaction-design-primer.html > > It's a short piece on how social interaction design differs from > conventional UI and user experience design, and in it I attempt an overview > of the three kinds of user and three modes of the social interface. > > All feedback welcome -- in comments or here! > > thanks! > > > adrian chan > > 415 516 4442 > Social Interaction Design (www.gravity7.com) > Sr Fellow, Society for New Communications Research (www.SNCR.org) > LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com/in/adrianchan) > > ________________________________________________________________ > Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! > To post to this list ....... 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