What do you consider the greatest challenges in designing for social media/software/networks?
Good Answers (12)
When you are designing social media you are not building and designing a product in the typical sense of that word. You are really designing an infrastructure upon which social interaction, and eventually a community, can build. The affordances needed to "direct" and "control" the development of a community are very different from and much more subtle than typical single-user systems that we (as designers, developers) know. I usually compare it metaphorically to a soap bubble: you can gently try to push it in a certain direction, but if if you push too hard, it'll burst. User-centered design takes on a whole new meaning when you are building social media and communities......
Designing for when there is "no there there." The users supply the content. However, the site needs to make sense and be compelling to those initial users who arrive when things are a bit sparse (otherwise you have no chance of it growing of course). In addition, a new user who joins the site (at any stage of that site's growth) should be able to understand how it works and see the site's value. They have to be motivated to do that initial work to become a part of the site before they've made a number of connections (or contributed content). Frequently Those two types of experiences are overlooked in favor of imagining every user experience being that of a long-time user on a mature site. But if those initial experiences aren't pleasant, the site won't ever reach that stage.
I have a hard time knowing what skills/experience/knowledge the audience will have. It seems like, in the past, early adopters were months or years ahead of late adopters, so you'd shoot for a feature set that pulled the late adopters forward while not boring the early adopters.
Now it feels more like we're on two different tracks, with the techy people learning one set of skills tools (like tagging, search queries, rss feeds) and other people learning a completely different set (myspace, photobucket, slide).
Maybe this was always true with the early Web vs AOL split, but it seems more pronounced now, and there are way more of them than there are of us.
Lately, I've been thinking about social software in terms of human relationships. Social software encourages relationships among a few types of entities: members, groups, and the company itself. There are also different types of relationships, ie: professional and personal. In all cases, trust, respect, and admiration are the goals.
So the challenges are:
1. How do we build trust?
(member>member, member>group, etc.)
2. What damages trust?
3. How does a member/group/company gain respect? Admiration?
4. What are the best practices for using open (anyone can participate) vs. closed (members-only) participation?
Other challenges...
5. How can you build switching costs into the system?
(without damaging trust among members/groups/company)
6. When do you spend $ to generate traffic to the site?
7. Which methods of advertising are most effective?
The biggest challenge I see is getting traction. You need something for people to gather 'round, something that gels a social network in the abstracted, context-free environment that is the web. This is a point that Rashmi often makes, and I think there's a lot to it.
Brand is important, but not as a point of balance so much as a calling card. I think Google and Yahoo have a challenge in the social media space because they have established brands around utility, not community. Flickr has remained a distinct brand because it has more cache in that arena that Yahoo. Once a brand has been established, I don't see much issue around balance.
As others have mentioned, relinquishing control is a huge challenge.
--peter
(Ericson pours a glass of whiskey) I think one of the greates challenges is how we can make social apps integrate better with our real lives in a sustainable and healthy way. How can we weave both virtual and physical social experiences better? How can the we make the off-line be more interesting online, and the online be more interesting off-line? I say the park is nice. Let's go there. But Facebook needs its page views. How can Facebook benefit from me turning the computer off and going to the park? I think that's the challenge.
Links:
Critical Mass in these areas
1) Members - there's got to be a sense of community. When there's nobody home, you won't come back forever to keep seeing nobody home.
2) Activity - evidence that people come to this place, so you might be persuaded to as well.
3) Content - People can visit, but unless they contribute something about themself or the subject area, what's the value for you as a visitor?
4) Frequency - There's a threshold for holding your attention. If weeks pass between 'hits' on your fishing line, you never build a habit of using the service.
Moderation considerations
1) Post moderation (someone reviews posts after their live), pre-moderation (someone screens posts before they go live) or self moderation (the community police themselves)? How important is it to keep the place clean and friendly? How rambunctious is the audience?
2) Can you afford to moderate? Each model has a potential cost in dollars, in activity lost and in damage to the community.
Community
1) Are you creating anarchy, a dictatorship, an oligarchy, a meritocracy, tribalism, feudalism, a democracy? What structures do you need to put in place to facilitate this system?
2) Do your users have a reason to like each other and communicate?
Purpose
1) What do people actually get out of visiting?
2) What is the motivating factor that makes them contribute?
3) What is the purpose of the community? Is it to create something? To hang out? To better the world? Is the purpose clear and achievable?
Links:
Erin M.
Partner at Tangible UX. I cowrote Designing Social Interfaces for O'Reilly Media.
I think one of the key considerations is being very clear about what you are designing. are you designing tools to bring together an already existing group of people with shared interests - the "there there" Peter mentions - or are you trying to create a space - an open playground - to then allow people to come in and create their own "there".
Then I think the next important element is the care and feeding of the space and people. Heather Champs' Ten Ways to Build Community are important lessons to remember. Just because you build it doesn't mean they will come.
fighting the realization that it's SO inefficient for people to be creating and managing multiple social networks. It's a useful feature of many types of services, but people don't want to keep separate networks on each service. What if your network could follow you like your social security number, invoked as part of your identity at multiple services?
It depends on the network you're designing for. There's a huge difference between the sprawling, discretionary social networks coordinated by LinkedIn and Facebook and the focused, intensional networks defined by a practice. There are other variations, mainly defined by the type of service used to marshal the network - online group lists, email list servers, etc. The challenges are in the emerging poles of Discretionary vs. Intensional networks. (I've written about this recently at Design Dialogues.)
It seems many of us are thinking about this right now, and you know how we can tell? People in related communities are exchanging enough to show up the big ideas and issues in these transparent networks.
The biggest challenges as I see them in the discretionary networks are related to individual attention and awareness management, and attention, information and feature overload, Too many choices, too many info streams generated by the multitude of weak links all pushed to the same point of user contact.
When designing for larger networks such as Facebook and MySpace, we need to realize not all features are important, not all signals in the network need to be routed. We need priority management, explicitly defined as user preferences, but more importantly, smart priority preference settings based on implicit user knowledge.
When designing for intensional networks as embodied in member-based networks - wikis, Ning, Yahoo & Google groups (and LinkedIn can be used as one), the issues are different. People have intentions served by the network, at least implicitly. Weak links may lead to business or your best collaboration ever - unlike Facebook where it may mean someone else is cruising to bump their friend count up.
The challenge here is stripping away the interface junk to reinforce a transparent experience of interacting with people whose purposes are fairly clear. LinkedIn does a pretty good job of this, considering - and notice they are not adding a lot of "discretionary" features that we might consider whether to use or not. There's some attention management.
Overall though, there's a human challenge that our increased use of social networks faces, and that's dissociation. As we turn more toward virtual networks, we are given the latitude to ignore the real ones that truly nurture us. Dissociation - the disconnection of Self from authenticity and action in real communities - is the psychological sickness of the tech age. We have so many tools for simulating connection, which may lock us in to certain tech-mediated styles of interaction. I think the challenge is to create more human social interfaces that encourage natural styles of interaction and lead to F2F commitment.
Links:
One challenge is making the social aspect enhance the product rather than clutter it up. Facebook, for all its hype, is too cluttered for my taste, while I think Linkedin gets it right (the degrees-ranked search results are a great example).
Another challenge is creating a quality network. I think one of the reasons Friendster tanked was the low quality of the network; seems like Myspace also has this problem of people adding a thousand people with sparse profiles as "friends". And yet, it's hard to enforce quality standards on profiles, or discourage people from randomly adding strangers to their friends list ... because you want people to join, don't you?
More Answers (47)
Avoiding copying or shooting for something that has already been successful while not pushing innovation and breakthrough.
Balancing between brand/editorial voice and community.
Links:
One of the biggest issues is creating the right incentives and motivations for participation. Just having a rating system or a tag cloud isn't enough to create an active community.
The greatest challenge is marketing, because marketing determines who your audience will be more than the quality of your product design.
Design-wise, the answer is similar: understanding who your audience will be, as chosen (hopefully) in close collaboration with marketing. If the marketing people don't exist or aren't powerful, then the features and the site design will alone be relied on to determine the audience -- and this will result in a fractured, aimless audience with no sustainability and no strategy except a hope to get lucky with some sort of coincidental generation of audience cohesiveness and thus community.
Links:
Clarification added September 26, 2007:
Clarification: I'm not trying to discount the importance of features or product design. I just happen to think that, especially among Christina's group of friends and contacts, we're more likely to fail to understand the importance of marketing than we are likely to fail to deliver powerful user experiences. Other answer-ers here are thinking along the same lines when they stress the importance of brand, voice, and acquiring users: all of these qualities are the things that marketing experts can really help with in a profound way.
To whatever extent that a UI designer can do this, that UI designer is performing a marketing function.
Understanding users to design a system where the right features are obvious and compelling - getting the right things right - right away.
Martin R.
Consultant, Creative Strategy & Design
Best Answers in: Web Development (4), Business Plans (1), E-Commerce (1)
Easy! It is a social network -- the hardest part is getting enough users that make it worthwhile for the users you have.
Getting past that cart and horse thing (or is chicken and egg) is the greatest struggle all successful social networks must get past.
1. Correctly assessing the potential (motivation) of the people to form and maintain the community. What drives them to use it and put effort into it? 2. Making interfaces and functionalities user-friendly enough to be used autonomously by large groups (i.e., without the help of professional designers, content specialists, etc.)
Amish P.
Strategic Innovation
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Building a qualified user base.
From our experience in building out these sort of sites for new ventures, the technical solutions are fairly straightforward, testing and QA even more so. We spend significant effort on online marketing and improving goal conversion for our clients.
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Two things:
1. Not doing one. I find the biggest issue these days is that companies continue to shy away from social networks as something someone else does. The loss of top down marketing control and the perceived liability of open-ended conversations still keeps many companies well away
2. Not looking at what networks already are working and carving out a space in them for yourself. I think a big mistake for a lot of companies is the idea they have to start complex processes like this by always building their own first. I think it would be better to start with a thread or user group or sanctioned community employee team to participate on other well-participated meta-forums first. If the desire is strong enough to create a unique social network that is more targeted to the select group, then the idea will have some momentum from the target community itself to move along.
The biggest problems I have encountered or seen on other sites is the delicate balance between moderation of content for common decency and being a totalitarian regime running things...keeping a community fun and lively, allowing members to be themselves but still enforce rules of some semblance of respect between members. This line in the sand is different for every topic and type of person...
My two sheckles...
Joseph S.
Tristream CEO and Founder, Lead Web Application Designer
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Christina,
The design part is relatively straight forward. The hard part is getting the right mix of features that will attract your target community. Facebook took off -- in the presense of MySpace's overwhelming success -- because it added one or two key features that really appealed to the college age demo.
How to know what that feature set is? If I knew that I'd be in great demand! But I think the answer lies in knowing and using a lot of social networks and then knowing (or being a part of) the community you want to serve.
For example here in LnkedIn, I am a "member"of the "BayCHI" group. But I haven't found it to be very useful. I would like to see the group be able to set up its own "Answers" area. I think this would make the BayHI group much more active and could prove to be a great draw for all groups created within LinkedIn.
But I am immersed in this network and use LinkedIn daily. To approach designing a social network without that kind of knowledge seems like a tough assignment.
Joseph Selbie
Founder, CEO Tristream
http://www.tristream.com
Jack V.
Knowledge Management and Operational Excellence Professional
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The answers thus far have made great points. I want to answer from a different reading of your question. You say desigining _for_ social media/software/networks, rather than desiging a social website.
In that light, there are still challenges around getting people on board.
But there are additional challenges with interoperability with _other_ social services. Do you offer a web feed? Can you accept web feeds? These seem to be some of the technical aspects that people need to make distributed people / websites work together these days.
And wouldn't it be nice if there were an external service that you could use to provide more automation to the "tell me who your friends are" functionality. There are lots of nuances to "friend" that many social network sites don't understand or don't use.
Privacy is going to be the biggest victim (if it isn't already). As the usage spreads more and more amongst not so tech savvy people, the designers need to take the pains of arming the users with information.
We also need to understand the differences in these social media/networks. Linked in featuring in Google search results is alright, since its a professional/career oriented network. However something like Facebook getting there is an overkill. Most of the users in such cases would not either not know this or if they know wouldn't be able to fathom the implications. Social Drama on prime time Internet? Maybe yes...
Coming up with a site or application that's useful to people and provides something new and practical instead of just another example of the social networking fad.
I would say one of the chief challenges is designing in flexibility. That is, not hardwiring or hardcoding the flows and boundaries and affordances and so on. If you manage to attract users, they will show you what they want to do and rather than respond with "that's not what it's designed to do," it's better to be able to redesign on the fly.
After attracting users, the biggest challenge is offering them something of value that they can use in their daily lives. One reason Facebook has been successful is because it gives people fodder for real-life conversations (and gossip!). LinkedIn works because people get to raise their hands and get "in front" of people they may not otherwise meet, a real professional advantage. You can get a group of like-minded people to come to a website, but unless you can give them something to take away into their real lives, they won't return.
People.
Providing an environment that users find safe and comfortable enough become members of while meeting the business needs of the company.
