[From OM]
In September, Joel on Software crafted a blog entry entitled It’s Not Just Usability that can be read both as a positivistic call to action and a scathing critique on the current methods used for understanding how design should connect with people. Personally, his words brought me great joy and should be deeply considered by designers, technologists and users of technology.
In design, there’s a desire to understand the relationship between the human and the computer. Interface designers are often trying to understand the psychology of the “user” so that they can offer an interface that will make the tasks at hand easy to do. This is the reason that cognitive and quantitative psychologists have been so involved in human-computer interaction.
Social tools don’t fit well into the HCI paradigm. While the interface is important, it is not as important as the way social relationships are negotiated. Napster was not a good interface, but the social desire to share overcame that. Many of the Articulated Social Networking tools are the same – a pain in the ass to use, but worth it because of the social component.
The ways in which tools for mediated sociability are conceptualized and analyzed must shift. No longer can we simply study how the user interacts with the tool, but instead we must consider how people interact with each other and how the tool plays a part in that interaction. Note: people, not users. The tool is not a primary actor in sociability, but a tool that mediates. People should not be framed in terms of the tool, but the tool framed in terms of their use.
This means focusing first on the types of social interaction desired and THEN on the technology necessary to instrument that interaction. A technology first approach is a crap-shoot. It can work simply because people may find a way to repurpose the tool to meet their needs. But without an understanding of the social behaviors that should be supported, one should not expect the technology to be valued simply because it is good technology.
Focusing on social interaction does not mean simply focusing on an activity unless you broaden the term activity to include identity construction, play and reputation management. These are all aspects of sociability and part of why people use these tools. Think about the role of an architect. An architect designs a public space not for a limited number of activities, but for an increased possibility of social interaction that will be extensible enough to support the diversity of ways in which people wish to interact. This is the kind of mindset that is needed.
Focusing on sociability means understanding how people repurpose your technology and iterating with them in mind. The goal should not be to stop them but to truly understand why what they are doing is a desired behavior to them and why the tool seemed like a good solution. A park bench wasn’t made for stretching but just because people do stretches on it rather than sitting on it doesn’t mean you should stop them. Taking away the park bench stops the sitters as well as the stretchers. Figure out how to support the stretchers and the sitters so that they are not in conflict but both appreciative of the park bench.
Think about Friendster. Friendster was built for a very specific activity, yet people’s interactions with the technology were about a whole range of social management. Their activities grew from their conception of how Friendster fit into their social lives. They did not see it as a dating site, yet the company kept trying to force them to see it that way. This was foolish. Instead, the company should’ve tried to support the wide ranges of behaviors in a way that was not conflicting. Consider the pub. Some people go to the pub to be voyeurs, some to date, some to socialize with friends, some to just drink. Pubs rarely try to make everyone have the same agenda – why should online services?
Much of this has been said before but not much of it has been heard. If we want to thinking about designing social tools, we must be prepared for a shift in mindset. If you find yourself thinking “those stupid users”, you’re in the usability frame not the sociability frame. Just as there are no stupid questions in the classroom, there are no stupid users in technology. People who use technology are offering a roadmap to different social behavior around technology than we normally consider. Pay attention to them.
culture first, technology second
Dear Danah ;-)! This is a smart way of RE-considering the nature of Ergonomy! As happened in Cognitive Psychology, when researchers adapted the concepts of their own subject to the problem of explaining social groups and relations between people, you are putting forward the idea of using the tools of Ergonomy to improve the quality of the social interaction by the Internet! We could even call this attempt SOCIAL ERGONOMY!!!!! Couldn’t we?
Relationships and entities in artificial social networks
And, that total sphere of relationship, inclusive of the relationships with the environment, is the who that the social software is ultimately about.
www. norfolkskies.blogspot.com
I have been reading around a lot of your stuff: why do you have to write in such dense academic jargon? It is possible to use simple language interspersed with the occasional piece of necessary terminology. Unless of course you have to make it inpenetrable to get further research grants 🙂
If you take a simple example such as weblog software, it is obvious that the guys who thought it up and the guy who started the algorithm on which the programming was based probably didn’t say,”This is going to be “Diary software”. It probably became apparent that this was a good way of encouraging its use once it was built. You could argue that the software might have been designed (with text manipulation “holding” and “carrying” facilities built into the package) to have a rapid up take, in order to carry advertising. Perhaps no one designing it cared at all what it was used for contentwise as long as the banners appeared at the top each time a weblog was loaded. Note how many free weblogs there are.
You talk a lot about metaphors in your writing when it would probably be easier to start with analogies (the old saw: there are only three ways to explain : model, analogy, metaphor).
If we ask in what way a typewriter is or is not analogous to a weblog, it becomes apparent pretty quick that that the weblog technology though providing, immediacy, rapid editability and mass readership (with the help of the internet/web) basically does the same job as a typewriter, post, compositor and rolling print.
Are they really fundamentally different? The typewriter typed sheet went to the letters page, or the opinion column (by mail or by hand) and was read by millions in the same way as the weblog/website is.
Where there is a difference (given the ability to change, store, replicate, link) is there is less feed back in the conventional print system. In a sense add-ons such as the counters and comments are the more advanced part of the weblog software. It is the feedback system that has been created which makes a weblog or general website different from traditional non-computer systems. Email is a feedback system. Links have been around since the beginning of the internet.
I have only just read about Friendster. It had a specific design/purpose which was quickly forgotten by the majority of users because they saw no point in it, or perhaps saw it didn’t nbenefit them or were not comfortable with too much personal disclosure.
I started off today with Blogdex which gave me Rachelle Winterton’s weblog via Glassdog at number 1. I had never seen LiveJournal before, but quickly saw that it provided for a friendship network. I used the open access to try to find out more about Rachelle through her “friends”. I wanted to see if any of them went to the same school, and if they might disclose more about her than her weblog. One boy wrote a poem in remembrance of Mrs. Winterton. By the way, Wikipedia has done a whole piece on her with a picture. The only pic of her I could Google was her basketball team (she’s number 21!).
I concluded in Norfolkskies, after a cursory look at her posts, that she was a manic-depressive, then found a post where she mentioned that she had visited her doctor, who said she was. The contet of her blog obviously did not give anything away about her real motivations and plans. She manged to hide everything except her pain. The “Friendship” links are no more than perceived commonalities.
It is obvious that the friendship networks go on for ever in something like LiveJournal, though not many nodes away Rachelle knows none of them. In LiveJournal it is other people who chose whether Rachelle is her friend, just as she choses friends for herself. It is a one way process that seems as if it is two way when you look at a personal profile. In Rachelle’s case some of her LiveJournal friends were actual school or local friends. But most of the 8 or so she listed on her site were kids from other parts of the states.
It is possible (once linked one way) for the lower level friend to make contact with the next level friend, but this friendship can only be based on what has been put in the next level up friend’s profile, while (Fraudster…) all or parts of the information (e.g. music preferences) may be true or false. What I am trying to say is that all you end up with is a simple network with each node containing nothing of any use.
You or one of your associates mentioned the proposed business intra-networks: that workers would not be happy for everyone else to know what they had done and were planning to do. This wouls be especially true in rigid hierarchies, though presumbly less so in flatter management structures.
The note-passing/”back-channelling” you mention is a perfect example of where the technology is discovered to be capable of something which makes a process less efficient (emailing, playing games, looking at porn during work time) until the activities are reorganised and directed (software that monitors activity such as keystrokes, bugs to monitor movement) towards the primary gaol – in this case understanding the lecture. The students were (are)using the ICT to avoid the lectures (or, as you say, to debate the topics amongst themselves), now they are to be forced (now that what they have been doing has been discovered)to use them in a way they do not want in order to increase the learning or at least direct it in the way the lecturer wants. In practical terms, the syllabus in an undergraduate course has to be stuck to.
A