I’ve been thinking about the differences between developing social and traditional applications. What’s the difference, for example, between developing Word and Facebook? The obvious difference is that one is social and one isn’t. But what does that really mean?
It means is that the user experience in social applications is defined, in large part, by the combination of the user themselves AND the network they keep around them. To elaborate on this thought… If both you and I use Microsoft Word we experience almost same thing. Sure, we each have our “lenses” that effect our perceptions of MS Word (user history, similar apps used, etc) and our experiences may be slightly different, but are still consistently defined by one persons perceptions as shown in figure 1 where arrows represent the inputs and outputs that feed the interaction.
Figure 1: Traditional Application
But your experience using a social application is defined by a combination of the application design, your personal lens, and the social network defined within the application. Adding the social network has several effects:
1. Application design is magnified because interactions pass through multiple user lenses on their way to you. Lets call this the “social lens”. This partially explains the rise in popularity of “Simple first” design of systems like Twitter that has a simple single purpose. That single purpose doesn’t get as watered down the interactions pass from user to user. This changes the above image to look something more like this. There is now a lot more IO defining one users experience as shown in figure 2.
Figure 2: The Social Lens
2. The user experience is defined by the nature of the relationships with the people in their social network. Your experience is going to be different based on how you relate to the people around you and how those people choose to relate to you. In life this is nothing new, but when it comes to application design it really forces you to think more carefully about user personas and personality types. An everyday college student and their friend group are experiencing very different things than an Internet celebrity with 10,000 5,000 friends that all want to get on their good side.
Figure 3: The Social Lens + Relationships
3. A users network size also defines their experience. Does the user loosely or tightly couple? If the user is someone that slowly collects a low number of really close friends the interactions are going to be less flighty and more intense because that’s how they, and likely their social network defines them. Twitter is a great example of this. With 10 friends its a tremendous presence application. At 100 friends it’s the modern AOL chat room. At 5,000 friends it becomes your personal soapbox and network computer. The same application with a different network size is perceived very differently by it’s users.
That this means, for anyone that works in the “Web 2.0” space, that a whole new set of complexities were introduced that you have to consider when thinking about designing systems that are dependant on each users social graph. It seems obvious, but if it was important when building classical applications to think about user personas then it’s just as important now to think about the personas + the effect on perception when interactions are filtered through a users social network.