SxDSalon: A group blog on social interaction design

Tummelvision recap: On social interaction design

I just signed off Tummelvision, a weekly podcast/videocast (in some cases) led by Deb Schultz, Heather Gold, and Kevin Marks, where we had a fascinating conversation about designing for social interactions. I was a lucky guest along with Julie Hamwood from Adaptive Path. The conversation was really stimulating, and wound in and out of perspectives about social interaction design (sxd). At first we were discussing Google Wave’s demise and Google’s inherent lack of social understanding...

User experience of the iPhone vs. iPad

My company, Bolt | Peters, recently conducted a user experience study of interactions on the iPhone vs. the iPad using a mobile payment system called Square. The most important take-away of this study to me is how social all our technologies are becoming — and how important social is as a design consideration. (We saw this with the iPad.) I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again… But for now, you can read the article in UX Magazine. Or the brief write-up by ZDNet. Or watch the...

How many users for social design problems?

I’ve been thinking a lot about research methods for social design problems. For example, how do you research what goes on on Facebook? How does Facebook do this currently? I believe they use metrics from their data team — which I do not believe really uncover social interaction design issues. How do you research how the unemployed find jobs? Surely they use their social networks. How do you research how to financial investors get advice from their community? How do you research consumer c...

On why people ask questions on social networks

Social search behavior is now generally agreed to be common enough that companies like Google are buying up companies like Aardvark, and academic researchers are asking good questions about the value of networks for question-answering (Q-A). I have done a bit of research in this area myself, and so I was quite pleased to read about this new study by Microsoft researchers Merrie Morris, Jamie Teevan, and Katrina Panovich. They were building upon (among other things) my work on asking and answerin...

Enterprise social search: a design workshop in San Francisco

This just in! Will Evans and I are putting on a design workshop in San Francisco around the theme of enterprise social search. The workshop will be an all-day affair on Friday May 7 at the Bolt | Peters offices, near the Civic Center. Detailed information and registration can be found here: http://socialsear.ch Why Enterprise Social Search? Knowledge management and information retrieval in large organizations is a huge problem. A number of orgs are making efforts to address these issues; and le...

Bodystorming privacy at OverlapSF

We had a great bodystorming session at Hot Studio last night. Dennis Schleicher Skyped in for the whole thing from Chicago and led the introduction and warm-up exercises! Our topic dealt with privacy issues in 2019 when we may, theoretically, have some device hanging behind our ears — or someplace discrete — that reads our thoughts and interfaces with things in the world. Other people could become aware of our thoughts and feelings (although the specific mechanisms of how this would work were le...

Using remote research to inform social interaction design (SxD)

This was originally posted on the Bolt|Peters blog on February 2, 2010, as a guest author. What is social interaction design? Social interaction design (SxD) is the practice of designing for person-to-person interactions mediated by a computer interface, going beyond pure usability and human-computer interaction. Even fairly solitary experiences like editing a Wikipedia page occur in a social context in which other users’ past interactions influence what new editors contribute. “I...

Vision board

Last week I made a vision board for 2010, which I have to recommend as an exercise to others! I already had a “themeword” for the year (see my previous post), but I wanted something in addition as a reminder of my goals, hopes, or dreams. When I set out to actually create the vision board, I wasn’t quite sure how it would turn out — and I engaged the Overlap SF group to do it together as an activity for our January meetup. I really hope other Overlappers will share the output ...

“Social” can’t be solved by an algorithm

I was contacted by a dutch journalist who’s writing an article on the merits of social interaction versus search engines. She read a paper of mine and emailed me with two questions. I thought it’d be useful to post my reply publicly: First, do you think search engines making use of social networks will improve search results and thus make our daily life a bit easier? Yes! A lot of fact finding and information discovery already comes from friends, colleagues, and even acquaintance...

2010: The start of a new decade

Really, this post is a reflection on 2009 and a look forward to 2010. 2009 was a strange year for me—it was like the growing pains of your teenage years. I started the year as Ph.D. student at UC San Diego. That sounds benign, but in fact, I was facing a department that set me up to fail, with what felt like mile-high walls that I had to climb over. I was placed on academic probation by my advisor who, instead of writing an email or telling me to my face that he didn’t like the direction...