Social experience design in online conversation

User and Social Experience Design

Some of my ideas and sketches for a platform that supports online conversation and collaboration that seeks to support human behaviour online rather than mimic real-world behaviour.

I’ve been in Sydney the past two days for Global Entrepreneurs Week 2009, organised by Matt Jones of Social Alchemy and Zara Choy.

I don’t want to go too much into the details of the various events I participated in but I was inspired to think about how technology could support and facilitate online virtual conversation and collaboration. The technology isn’t the problem – we have the tools available – it’s the design and implementation of those tools.

So while others sat around the table at Tom & Tom’s Cafe on Bathurst Street talking about entrepreneurship and getting people involved and conversing I observed the interactions taking place and sketched a few ideas:

So what is the key challenge?

If you wanted to simply translate physical conversations to the virtual space you end up with Second Life. While SL is an interesting application and social network it is a “dumb” interpretation of physical interactions. It mimics physical assets with realistic renderings of human-like characters and proximity and directionality of audio or chat so you have to walk up to someone to talk and then can drift in an out of clusters of people to join in various conversations.

Strengths and weaknesses

But I see that technology and the online space shouldn’t be seen as the poor cousin of the “real” world. It is something different. It is capable of things that are impossible in the physical world and it lacks in areas of experientiality that we take for granted in the physical realm. So instead of trying to mimic the real world how about we leverage the power of technology and opportunities of the online space and forget about trying to reproduce in lo-fi those aspects of social interactions that simply are not technically feasible at this time.

It’s about distilling social interactions to the bare components, identifying what’s important and augmenting those facets to facilitate online conversations and multi-way transfer of ideas and information.

Conversation on Twitter

So I observed these three people sitting around the table. They never all spoke at once and for the most part only one spoke at a time. But the others were listening. When one spoke they either spoke at one person in response to something they’d said, or just made a general comment to open a new topic of conversation.

Twitter is very binary when it comes to identifying conversation. It either sees a general comment or a Reply due to the prepending of that comment with someone’s handle, and it only identifies one-to-one replies. Conversation isn’t that simple though. Even if you don’t specify someone’s name you often say something with an audience in mind and you expect that audience will recognise what you say as being relevant to them and they will participate – either by simply listening or responding back.

Forum lurkers

Web forums don’t recognise listeners. People are placed in the social hierarchy by the number of posts they’ve made although yes to a much lesser extend the date they joined is also taken into account. Many times I’ve seen new users on forums being insulted for speaking out of turn due to the fact they have a low post count and been instructed to get back in their box.

This doesn’t happen with, say, real-world focus groups where a group of people sit around a table sharing thoughts. Even if someone has said nothing for the first hour of a focus group the group will still recognise that that person has been listening and will respect them when they do decide to explicitly contribute something to the conversation.

IRC and boxes

While not so popular these days, IRC is a prime example of a conversation where everyone participates in and listens to a singular, linear torrent of conversation. While channels would have a “topic” in my experience the conversation rarely stuck to the topic thus rendering that label irrelevant. Topic is embedded in the conversation – not defined by some notion of what the conversation might entail before the fact.

We spoke yesterday about town halls and how participants in town hall meetings would either be inside the four walls of the town hall or outside and thus not a participant at all. Topics should be used to seed conversation and be a central post around which conversation gathers or drifts away. Topic should not be a four-walled box that requires participants to be either in or out of that box and thus in or out of the conversation. It excludes people and ideas, and creates artificial boundaries that can inhibit progress and innovation; something about which I was also speaking with Fee Plumley from the Australia Council for the Arts about.

The solution

I don’t claim to have the solution because to come up with a design for something that truly supports online conversation and does it well is beyond my skill and available time to produce. To develop the solution requires designers, psychologists, social networking professionals, sociology and anthropology academics and researchers.

What I do have is some rough ideas of interactions and user interfaces (because that’s what I specialise in) – you can see these alluded to in the scan of my sketchpad above, but just quickly:

The first interaction I considered was proximity and conversations. You can have a hundred people in a physical room but they won’t all be talking to each other at the same time. Groups reach a point where they divide and split off into smaller conversations of 2-5 people (from experience, I’m sure there’s research to back that up). I don’t expect those numbers would translate directly to the virtual space because the parameters are different. A chat room is not like a ring of chairs and the normalised “volume” in a chat room does not reflect the reality of having to yell across a pub.

But I wanted to come up with some way of providing a mechanism for smaller conversations whilst still maintaining the presence of an entire room of people. A way of bubbling up in visual priority to each participant the conversations they’re involved in whilst in the periphery maintaining at a lower priority the other conversations going on in the room so that people can drift in and out of conversations. This also requires a way of identifying topics and conversations and clustering those together into groups:

It looks a little like Plurk with the timeline – and yes, this implementation does include communicating the passage of time over which these conversations take place as do most chat and microblogging platforms – but only to the extent required to provide context and show the movement of participants between conversations. This is just an idea and doesn’t reflect what I’d expect the interface to actually look like as this model has some problems with for example longer monologues and embedded media.

Drifting in and out

The way I imagined you might move between conversations was to simply click on someone who’s participating in a conversation you want to join. That cluster of discussions would then move to the fore, in the middle of the screen with higher visual priority (larger font size etc) than the other clusters of conversation with the appropriate transitional effects to maintain context during the move between clusters. You could then say something and it would be rendered in association with that cluster. If you wanted you could also direct a response at anyone using something as simple as the “@” format used on Twitter so the interface could also visually link those one-to-one direct responses, depending on how important it was determined such dialogue was to the conversation at a cluster level and as a whole within the room as part of the system design.

Other things I tried to capture was how to represent someone who’s listening to a conversation but not actually speaking. I had an idea of listing everyone in the room down the Y-axis of the timeline but wasn’t sure if the constant motion of clusters and reorganising of the list along with the horizontal dimension and the association of names with things said would render the feature useless or annoying.

I still haven’t addressed how to capture conversation topic or even answered the question if explicitly defining a topic is necessary for context or distracting and a hurdle for the evolution of conversation for the reasons I mentioned earlier. I was thinking of some sort of tagging system but wasn’t sure how that would work with conversations that morph, coming together and drifting apart. If you have four people in a conversation and you tag than conversation are those tags still relevant once two people have left? What do we define as the conversation? What’s happening now or what has happened? How much priority do we give to things that have been said.

Post-conversation

One of the opportunities I saw with online collaboration like this is the joint development of outcomes – something that doesn’t happen as often as it should in real world conversations. It’s great to talk about something and come up with ideas … but then what happens? Can this platform link into a mechanism for recording ideas, decisions, task lists and people nominating themselves to do things? How does that fit in with the fluid model for conversation I’ve described?

So that’s pretty much where I got to. I don’t have the skill or time to invest in the research, design and development of such a tool … but I’m pretty sure that a) nothing like this exists and b) we need a platform like this in order to hold large-scale conversations that support hundreds of participants yet accommodate the way people actually want to converse.

If you want to go build this thing, go for it – published under the site-wide BY-NC-SA Creative Commons license. Just give me credit and let me help design it, thanks! I just ask that if you’re going to bother investing the time and money that you do it properly – keeping in mind that throwing technology at this is not the answer and that a good user experience can be subtle.

// purecaffeine.com is a user interaction and UX design, social media and Government 2.0 blog run by professional Canberra, Australia web user interaction designer Nathanael Boehm, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License.

Related posts:

1. Online conversations: Limitations and opportunities
2. Is topic context? Is context constraint?
3. Staff collaboration: Social is not a dirty word!