Just Add Social Noor on social software and user experience

I moderated a workshop on social TV at the UXTV conference a couple of weeks ago. Approximately 70 – 80 participants attended the workshop (I was expecting 20 – 30 based on the number of position papers that were submitted). Overall, it went pretty well and the participants were a nice mix from industry/academia and North America/Europe. The workshop was largely discussion–based, where the participants discussed different topics in smaller groups and then had a larger discussion with the larger group. I had planned on going through five different discussion topics but we only had time for three (the attendees were fairly talkative). Here’s a short summary of some of the discussions that took place:

Topic - Creating social experiences for interactive TV
Discussion questions:
How can TV-mediated social scenarios augment TV watching?
Who are the target users of social TV concepts?

• A lot of discussion about target users
  • General assumption is that younger users will use social TV since they’re already on Facebook, MySpace, etc
  • This assumption was challenged by several participants who felt that the elderly would have more use for social TV features since they watch more TV and their networks are smaller (so they may have a greater need to socialize via TV)
  • Talk of the elderly then led to discussion about how social TV should be “simple” – the assumption that it should be simple was again challenged by another participant (older doesn’t always mean less technical)
• In retrospect, I should have had the participants define what they think social TV is because I think there are a lot of different notions about what it is – voice chat vs. text chat vs. polling vs. asynchronous features (e.g. recommendations, sharing TV history/DVR list, etc)

Topic - Social TV and the Social Web
Discussion questions:
What can interactive TV learn from the social web?
Where should social TV features live? Online? On the set-top box?

• One participant started off this segment of the discussion stating that we can’t really know what will with TV since social software is still pretty new and we don’t really know which sites will fail/succeed
• We then started talking about the limitations of the set-top box as a gateway to social TV
  • No keyboard, are users willing to have a wireless keyboard on the coffee table next to the remote?
  • TV isn’t an open network like the Internet – cable/satellite/IPTV providers aren’t going to open up their networks
  • People think about their social networks not which of my friends have the same TV service as me
  • TV is a shared device, nobody wants to login to their TV
• There was some discussion about how social TV features should live on the web instead
  • Users already online using social sites, they wouldn’t have to recreate their networks (social network fatigue)
  • Others felt that TV is more accessible – more people know how to use TVs and more people have access to TVs than computers/Internet. Limiting features to computer users may miss some users who could benefit from these features.
• One of the participants worked at CurrentTV and talked about their experiments of using Twitter with the presidential debates

Topic - Moving past prototypes into viewers’ homes
Discussion questions:
How can social TV concepts move from the prototype stage to actual products in viewers’ homes?
What are the technical, user experience, and business constraints that need to be solved?

• ROI came up a lot at this point. Without a good business model around social TV, it is hard to see where it would fit in the TV experience.

I spent a few days this week in Seattle attending a private Microsoft conference about engineering best practices.  Being a Microsoft employee not based in Puget Sound, I’ve traveled to Seattle several times in the past couple of years so I’m somewhat familiar with SeaTac.  The past couple of times I’ve been to Seattle, there has been a major construction project at the airport and both times (in March and this afternoon) I’ve made errors while trying to return my rental car.  It’s frustrating when you make an error, but it’s even more frustrating when a system isn’t designed to help you gracefully recover from the error.

Last March, when I tried to return my rental car, I saw the “rental car return” sign a few moments too late and couldn’t actually turn into the “rental car plaza” (I believe that’s what the fine folks in Seattle refer to the rental car garage).  Instead, I followed a cab to the lower level of the garage where the cabies and shuttles pull in to pick up passengers.  When I made that mistake, I ended up having to  circle around the terminal a second time in order to enter the correct entry to the garage.  This experience was frustrating and it added a few extra minutes to my airport commute.  Recovering from this error wasn’t exactly graceful but at least the system allowed me to recover from the error.  It still seems ridiculous to me that there wasn’t a clear way to get to the level of the garage designated for returning rental cars from the commercial vehicles level.

This afternoon, my error was more drastic and recovering from it (using the airport’s system) was essentially impossible.  I’m not sure which entrance to SeaTac I had used this afternoon, but it certainly wasn’t the one I’ve used in the past (I needed to pump gas and used GPS to guide me to a nearby gas station and then to the airport).  I correctly followed the signs marked rental car return so that I was in the right lane and not the left lane, which was marked freeways.  At one point, a series of orange cones marked an exit - but an exit to what I wasn’t sure.  And since nobody was entering that exit, I just followed the rest of traffic straight ahead.  A moment too late I realized that the unmarked exit with the orange cones was where I was supposed to be heading to return my rental car.  I tried not to panic because I figured like most airports, there’s probably a way to go around the terminal and come back to where I needed to go.  Unfortunately, that was not the case today.  At that point, my only option was exiting to one of two freeways.  This option wouldn’t have been so bad except that the freeway I chose was a parking lot (due to further construction on the freeway).  Getting off at the next exit, getting on the freeway in the opposite direction, and finally getting to the airport and correctly entering the rental car return part of the garage added an extra 30 minutes to my airport commute.  I find that extremely unacceptable.

In both of these situations, the designers of the airport seem to assume that travelers won’t be making any mistakes.  In any situation, that assumption is ridiculous, and it is even more ridiculous in the case of travel.  Observing people at airports, they tend to be overwhelmed, short on time, and confused.  Designing a system for any user (especially this set) and not accounting for errors is poor user experience.  I realize that the airport is undergoing a construction project, but even a temporary design should minimize errors and offer users a way to recover from errors.

I’m organizing a social TV workshop at UXTV 2008.  Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

• How can TV-mediated social scenarios augment TV watching?
• What can interactive TV learn from the social web?
• What are some of the challenges in developing and implementing social TV? How can they be addressed?
• How can social TV concepts move from the prototype stage to actual products in viewers’ homes?
• What are some of the privacy implications of social TV? How can those concerns be addressed?
• Who are the target users of social TV concepts?
• What is the future outlook of social TV?

The idea of social TV is still fairly new and I’ve yet to see a mainstream TV system take advantage of social networks (Netflix Friends/Community is probably the closest).  I’m excited about the workshop and I think it will be pretty interesting.  If you’ve been involved in a social TV project or are interested in the topic, please consider attending and submitting a position paper.  Submissions are due September 15th.

This semester, I decided to take a statistics class at the UC Berkeley extension in Redwood City.  Stats has never been one of my strengths so I decided to take the class to bolster my skills and refresh my memory.  For my class project, I decided to conduct a survey of engagement with social media sites, focusing on Facebook, flickr, and del.icio.us.  My main question was whether there is a relationship between a user’s age and their engagement with a social network site.  To assess engagement, I looked at two metrics - size of social network and size of digital artifacts collection. I defined digital artifacts for each site as Facebook wall posts, flickr photos, and del.icio.us bookmarks.  In my sample, I found a weak negative association between age and level of engagement, meaning that younger users tended to be more engaged.  Nonetheless, this relationship was fairly weak.  These results seem counterintuitive to me - I hypothesized a strong negative association.  I believe that these results are due to my sampling procedures, which were not random at all and most participants tended to be around my own age.

Out of curiosity (and because the Excel CORREL function is super easy to use), I started correlating all sorts of various metrics, hoping I can find a strong association somewhere in my data!  I found a strong positive association with the size of a del.ico.us user’s network and the size of her bookmarks collection.  This means that as a user’s social network increased in size, so did their bookmarks collection.  These results are interesting but not too surprising given the nature of del.icio.us.  del.icio.us users with larger social networks are exposed to more bookmarks, merely because they know more users who are posting more bookmarks and those bookmarks are winding up in their Network page.  And once those bookmarks end up on their Network page, they can easily save those bookmarks themselves.

For those who may be interested, my project slides are now available online.

For whatever reason, my fervor in blogging SXSW did not carry over to ICWSM, even though I enjoyed ICWSM far more than SXSW.  I’ve considered going back through my notes from the conference and posting my impressions of various talks but that seems a bit futile now that it has been almost a month since the conclusion of the conference.

At any rate, I did want to post some of my impressions regarding the conference, especially compared to last year’s.  As much as I enjoyed last year’s conference, this year’s conference was considerably better!  Compared to last year’s selection, I noticed a significant improvement in the quality of papers presented at this year’s conference.  This noticeable improvement may have been due to this year’s 26% acceptance rate (I’m not sure about last year’s acceptance rate).

Of all the sessions I attended, the set of papers in the psychology session were my favorite.  Two papers come to mind - What Elements of an Online Social Networking Profile Predict Target-Rater Agreement in Personality? and Thin Slices of Online Profile Attributes.  In the first paper,  David Evans, Sam Gosling, and Anthony Carroll used a Facebook application to determine if users’ impressions of their own personality matched how their friends perceive them.  They then built a social network site and conducted the same test but with random users, where users made assessments about others’ personalities via their profile information.  In both instances, they found that users tended to understand one another (or put more appropriately - the way that users perceive themselves tended to coincide with how others perceived them). In the second paper, Kristin Stecher and Scott Counts looked at various aspects of online profiles and found that users can generally learn about other users with a minimal amount of profile information (”think slices”).  They also considered the utility of various online profile attributes.  Not surprisingly, profile photos bubbled up to the top.

I’m looking forward to reading the four papers from this session.  Overall, ICWSM 2008 was a great conference and I’m glad I had an opportunity to attend and present.

This morning, I’ll be presenting my social TV paper at ICWSM.  For those who may be interested, I’ve posted the slides to Slideshare.  I really enjoyed working on this study and I’m looking forward to the talk.  Being that this is the last day of the conference and so early in the morning, I fear nobody will be there!  Hopefully, I’m proven wrong.

I’m in Seattle for the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, where I’ll be presenting my paper Exploring Social Media Scenarios for the Television on Wednesday morning.  Since I tend to make last minute changes to my slide decks, I’ll post the slides after the conference.

If you’re around, please say hi!

Jared Spool gave a great talk the other day at SXSW comparing magic and mental models. Spool’s talk was really fun, very valuable, and timely. He centered the talk around several magic tricks, which were very entertaining. In using magic as a metaphor for experience design, Spool pointed out that people enjoy magic but they don’t have to know how it is done - in fact it might be more fun if they didn’t know. This same point can be applied to user experiences - the user shouldn’t have to know what is happening behind the scenes. The model presented in the UI should be that of the user, not the designer. He used the example of files in operating systems - there are no files (just ones and zeros) and nothing is ever deleted. But does the user need to know that? No, it is much simpler (and offers a better experience for the user) to just create this illusion that there are files and that they’ve been removed from the recycle bin (or copied elsewhere on the hard drive). He also talked about perceived performance vs actual performance. They’ve found that task completion is the one factor that impacts users’ perception of performance. When users can complete a task quickly and easily, they perceive a system to be faster than it really is. Finally, he pointed out a number of ways to delight users - being whimsical (e.g. Twitter), attention to details (e.g. displaying the correct iPod color in iTunes), and offering critical functionality (e.g. Farecast’s fare predictions).

A few days ago at SXSW, I attended Derek Powazek’s talk - Weird Turn Pro: Crowdsourcing for Creatives. What a treat! This was my second time attending a Powazek talk and he always manages to be both engaging and informative. In this talk, Powazek offered strategies for soliciting and incorporating user generated content into online communities. Powazek first started the talk by debunking three common lies for not incorporating UGC - everyone is an idiot, the good stuff is hard to find, and you can’t make any money off of it. To debunk the idiots myth, he pointed to a number of projects, including Wikipedia. He was quick to point out that Wikipedia is hard to replicate since it involves a certain altruistic element that may not be true in all community projects. Powazek then talked about different ways to better enable discoverability of UGC - human powered (e.g. editors), computer powered (e.g. Google PageRank, Technorati), and hybrid (e.g. Flickr interestingness).

He also emphasized that UGC isn’t about getting *free* creative labor. You have to offer your community incentives to generate stellar content and those incentives have to be appropriate for the community and the level of work involved. Powazek pointed out that Threadless offers multiple incentives for participating - bragging rights, money, and access to special features of the site (thus creating a class of membership that others in the community aspire to be).

Powazek also warned that just because you own the content, doesn’t mean that you should do with it what you please (again the old mantra of just because you can doesn’t mean you should applies here). You can’t violate the community’s trust. He gave an example of Yahoo! creating a Wii portal that pulled in Wii-tagged Flickr photos. Even though Yahoo! could do that (technically and legally), they should have asked the permission of their users. Instead, they angered their users who retaliated by posting inappropriate photos and tagging them as Wii - hence having these photos appear on the Wii portal.

Finally, Powazek stated that you can’t build a community - you must grow it. He offered the following tips for growing communities - give users the tools they want, trust people to be good, reward good contributions, punish bad contributions, and expect the unexpected.

I really enjoyed this talk - you should watch Powazek’s blog for the slide deck and the SXSW site for the podcast.

Today’s SXSW keynote given by Frank Warren (of PostSecret) has been the highlight of my SXSW experience. Warren is an engaging speaker, very down to earth, and had a great positive message. It was one of the most heartwarming talks I’ve been to in a long time. It was refreshing to be at SXSW and not hear yet another snarky panelist. Warren talked about how the project started and how it has evolved. He also shared a number of PostSecret postcards, some of them that were not included in the PostSecret books due to copyright or privacy issues. Warren attributed the overwhelming success of the project to the fact that we all have secrets and can probably identify with one of the cards. Warren stated, “All of us have a secret that will break your heart.”

I think what I really enjoyed about Warren’s talk is that this is *exactly* the sort of stuff that makes me love online communities - that ability to reach out to other people whom you may not know, identify with them on a basic human level, and create something bigger and better than anything you could have done without the connective tissue of the Internet. Throughout the talk, I kept thinking back to the 1000 journals project, an art project where participants wrote/drew in traveling journals that were eventually scanned and shared online. What I really love about PostSecret and the 1000 journals project is that these projects utilize the Internet and online communities as a tool to get organized and share with the whole world but they’re not about the technology. The important part is the art, the collaborative nature of it, and the people behind it.

If you’re interested in reading more about Warren’s keynote, CNet has posted a pretty good article.