User and Social Experience Design
Be mindful of artificial boundaries that limit and guide social interactions on websites.
I blogged in May last year about what makes a site social and how social websites facilitate social interactions between users, to varying degrees. Some sites allow people to publish comprehensive profiles and bios and are very focussed on interaction such as Facebook. Other sites you are barely aware of the other people around you but you know they’re there because someone’s voting for articles and you see the occasional user alias or handle pop up.
I want to talk now specifically about actual conversations and discussions that take place on social-enabled websites. Chatting to people online is different from in person, in the “real” world. For starters it’s a different social dynamic with different rules of play, different politics. Each community has its own feel, its own rhythm; just compare the sorts of comments on YouTube from those on UX Exchange.
Of course the site themselves attract different sorts of people – those interested in videos of hamsters may not be the same sort of people interested in discussing patterns for visualisation of hierarchical information in user interfaces. However the technical capabilities of the website also play a big part in determining how a brand new website attracts and builds a community around it and for social networking sites that are entirely built around user-generated content then those technical capabilities play a very big part in determining the future of that website. However just because vBulletin is a great forum software package doesn’t mean that every vBulletin-powered site will blossom into an active and friendly online community.
When it comes to conversations there are a few obvious differences between online/virtual discussions and offline real-world ones:
- Online conversations don’t have the same group-size limitations that in-person conversations do. A thousand people can get involved whereas in the real world the practical limit is about five depending on the group configuration and context.
- Online conversations can go on for years whereas a group sitting around a table at a pub might last a couple of hours.
- The medium for interaction by typing is different from talking – each with it’s own benefits and limitations.
The main limitations around online discussions that I have in mind stem from the fact that we’re trying to compress and simplify the complexity of back-and-forth multi-directional dynamic conversation down into a linear two-dimensional fixed-width format all represented as text.
When it comes to online conversation there are two main modes I see (and I mentioned this in my previous post social experience design in online conversation): the broadcast and the direct reply. The broadcast is aimed at no one in particular but if you’re kicking off a new discussion on a forum then you’re roughly aiming it at the community there, or if you’re broadcasting someone further into a topic of conversation then you’re roughly aiming it at people who have already participated in that conversation (who you hope are still listening). The other sort is more direct and Twitter is an excellent example of this. While in Twitter it is possible to prepend your tweet with a string of user handles the actual data relationship is one-to-one.
Nested forums such as Mashable enforce this direct reply model by visually relating replies by indenting them under the relevant post. If you want to broadcast you get put at the end of the linearised conversation.
Now of course real-world conversations are rarely this organised … it’s not like a debate where people take turns to speak for 5 minutes. Real-world conversations are usually faster paced, dynamic, interwoven, complex and can involve interruptions where people talk over the top of others or stop others before they can finish talking. In some ways online conversations are more civilised … although in my experience the shallower the social interactions that a site facilitates the higher the chance of flaming and bad etiquette.
Some sites will have limitations on such nesting – such as Mashable which limits conversations down to three levels. This means that person A can post something, person B can reply, person A can reply to that … and that’s it, after that all conversation is linearised at the third level. From a user’s perspective that doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t reflect any real-world rules on only being allowed to respond a certain number of times … except perhaps in a court of law. This is an example of a technical limitation (trying to keep everything neat and tidy within your 1024×768 without excessive whitespace and narrow-width text areas) that intrudes on the user experience and social interaction.
Other websites such as Slashdot that regularly attracts over a hundred comments per article is based on a progressive disclosure model where the user has to click down through the hierarchy of conversations and replies to read and participate. This puts up barriers that once again are designed to maintain visual and informational order but interfere with the experience and interaction.
Wouldn’t it be annoying if during a real-world conversation people only said the first seven words of what they wanted to say and you had to prompt them to say the rest of it?
There are many different other configurations of such threaded or linear discussion where the design will influence how conversations take place and generally impose artificial boundaries on those conversations that can limit or guide how conversations play out. For example just this morning due to Mashable’s design I ended up not posting a reply because it wouldn’t have appeared nested under the person’s post as I wanted and expected … and that was just enough to persuade me to not comment.
YouTube doesn’t offer nesting, it’s all linear offered in short chunks in reverse chronological order where if people want to have an argument it’s at the only level of conversation, the top level which is why disagreements are often so visible and affect YouTube’s reputation.
Think about these factors when designing a social website that facilitates online conversation and consider every decision about layout and presentation that may inhibit online conversation and social interactions between people.
// 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.
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Thanks for the post!
Keith