How can HCI improve social media development?

Workshop theme and goal

Social media are systems and applications supporting content sharing and co-creation in sociable online environments. This includes solutions for media sharing (e.g. YouTube, Flickr), self presentation and debate (e.g. MySpace, bloggs), social networks (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn), referencing and recommendation services (e.g. Digg, Del.icio.us) and co-created knowledge resources (e.g. Wikipedia). Social media may also include technology platforms such as interactive television and mobile phones.

The growth of social media will most likely have important consequences for the field of HCI. Social media is said to debate in terms of user experience, usability, and most importantly what matters to users" (Porter, 2007). Vice versa, HCI and usability will be increasingly relevant for social media development. In a recent study by Brandtzæg and Heim (2008) end-users reported low usability as their third most important reason for reduced use of particular social network sites. A similar perspective is held by danah boyd (2005) criticizing what she terms "autistic social media".

Social media development implies important challenges for the field of HCI. Social media's context of use, and end-users competencies and preferences are changing rapidly and unpredictably. Social media design needs to support not only individual users, but communities and co-creation of content (Battarbee, 2003; Light, 2004). Knowledge resources such as guidelines and design patterns, needs continuous updating due to fast changes in what is considered successful social media design. Evaluation of social media requires sensitivity to utility and user experience issues rather than just usability (Preece, 2001; Nov, 2007), while at the same time user feedback methods should not overburden participants (Schümmer and Lukosch, 2007).

References

• Battarbee, K. (2003). Defining co-experience. In the proceedings of Designing Pleasurable Products and Interfaces (DPPI). Pittsburgh, PA, USA. June 23-26, 2003.
  boyd, d. (2005). Autistic Social Software. In J. Spolsky (ed.) The Best Software Writing I. Apress, pp. 35-45.
• Brandtzæg, P.B., Heim, J. (2008). User Loyalty and Online Communities: Why Members of Online Communities are not Faithful. In the proceedings of Intelligent Technologies for Interactive Entertainment (INTETAIN), Cancun, Mexico. January 8-10, 2008.
• Light, A. (2004). Audience Design: Interacting with Networked Media, Interactions special issue on HCI and Mass Communication, XI(2), pp.60-63.
  Nov, O. (2007). What motivates Wikipedians? Communications of the ACM, 50(11), pp. 60-64.
• Porter, J. (2006). Ugliness, Social Design, and the MySpace Lesson, Bokardo, posted August 18, 2006 at http://bokardo.com/archives/do-myspace-users-have-bad-taste/
• Preece, J. (2001). Sociability and usability: Twenty years of chatting online. Behavior & Information Technology, 20(5), pp. 347-356.
• Schümmer, T., Lukosch, S. (2007). Patterns for Computer-Mediated Interaction. NJ: John Wiley & Sons, pp. 65-186.