SxDSalon: A group blog on social interaction design

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...

Digital Ethnography for Social Interaction Design

I was invited to speak at the Yahoo Research Group seminar last week (December 9, 2009) about the research methods I’ve used to study online communities. I called the talk “Digital Ethnography for Social Interaction Design” to capture the essence of what I wanted to cover. There are a number of challenges in studying online communities (the “social interaction design” part) — most notably that you cannot “shadow” someone’s day-to-day activities in ...

Social shopping: Putting the emotion back in e-commerce

This was originally posted on ReadWriteWeb on December 4, 2009, as a guest author. What are you going to buy this holiday season? Gift cards aren’t very personal, but friends’ recommendations can be. Richard MacManus recently covered the trends in e-commerce over the past decade. He noted that Amazon and eBay have dominated the online retail market with their model of using implicit user data to generate recommendations for others. Although this model will surely remain a centerpiec...

Designing for Sociality in Enterprise Search

Will Evans beat me to the punch in getting this post out! Earlier this month, we collaborated on creating a presentation for the Enterprise Search Summit West on “Designing for Sociality in Enterprise Search.” It went over pretty well and was fun to deliver! Here is more info for your enjoyment: This is the description of the presentation: Social search has the potential to improve search practices beyond what is possible with traditional informational retrieval algorithms. Two dif...

Three Flavors of Social Search: What to Expect

This was originally posted on ReadWriteWeb on November 12, 2009, as a guest author. With Google’s Social Search experiment, Bing’s integration with Twitter, and with Yahoo!’s partnership with One Riot—it’s clear that social search has both potential and momentum. But what will social search look like, and will it help us search better? And if it will, how? I’ve written previously about how social search won’t replace traditional search, how social relevancy rank may b...