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 media in the enterprise: formal v informal sociality

Social media will continue to penetrate the enterprise in 2010. And if past discussions are any indication, we should be able to look forward to a healthy discussion around similarities and differences between consumer-facing social media, and social media as deployed behind the firewall.We can agree, I think, that in each case, it's as much the users that makes social media work as it is the tools themselves. No social media application functions without its users. In fact, all social media req...

New Presence patterns in the Yahoo! Pattern Library

We just published two new social patterns in a new category, called Presence (under People), in the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library. The two patterns are Availability and Updates. The Design Pattern Library is a collection of guidelines for the design of online interactions that can aid decision-making and guide the work of web developers and designers. I’ve been studying the concept of “Presence” (often meaning remote presence – telepresences – or digitally med...

Talk to each other – moderation in public forums

Atlantic blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates maintains a consistently lively, interesting, respectful discussion section on his blog. The combination of substance and civility is maintained with a firm hand on moderation – people who don’t follow the rules are out. He posted his moderation policy, in response to an influx of new readers. In the policy, Coates called out an item that seems striking in our culture of conversation. Coates insists that his commenters actually talk to each othe...

The Questions We Ask

A couple of weeks ago I gave the 5 Principles, 5 Practices, 5 Anti-Patterns talk to the IxDA Los Angeles group. It was a great group of people and they asked me some really tough questions at the end of the talk. I thought some of them were so good, I have been thinking about them since and wanted to share more thoughts about the ideas. 1. We are now seeing lots of people online and using sites like Facebook. People are living out their experiences online and sharing all sorts of things  –...

RT vs. Retweet

This is a post about "retweeting," a beautifully evolved and delicate little social dance called that Twitter users invented, and Twitter's so-called "Retweet" feature, which stomps on it. In this post, I'll call the original, organically evolved practice "RT" (as it is usually written in tweets), and Twitter's confusingly named mis-feature "Retweet" (with uppercase "R"). Social Relationship An RT comes from somebody I follow. The reason I follow people on Twitter is because I want to know...

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...

Designing for Sociality in Enterprise Search

A few weeks ago, I was able to collaborate with Brynn Evans in creating a presentation for Enterprise Search Summit West. Here is the description of the presentation as well as links to the original on SlideShare. Social search has the potential to improve search practices beyond what is possible with traditional informational retrieval algorithms. Two [...]

Designing for the gut

I want you to watch this video from a recent Sarah Palin rally (hat tip: Marshall Kirkpatrick). It gives us “who” I’m talking about. While you could chalk up the effect of the video to clever editing, I’ve seen similar videos that suggest that the attitudes expressed are probably a pretty accurate portrayal of how some people think (and, for the purposes of this essay, I’m less interested in what they think). It seems to me that the people in the video largely t...