The Importance of Social Interaction Design In A Community

There are user interaction designers, user interface designers, ui architects, user experience gurus, etc, etc. With communities there is a new breed of designer that is becoming extremely valuable; social interaction design.

A lot of UI design in the past was focused around strict conversion. Monetary conversions, converting to a registered user, converting users to more page views, conversion from one step to another. But in a community or social network conversion to certain actions are important, there are many other factors at play.

Social interaction design isn’t about strict conversion to action, but conversion to the correct action within the context of the community. Every action a user takes helps shape the overall environment of the community, and the environment helps shape future actions by the user. Its a continuous loop where a small number of wrong actions can have a significant negative effect on the community as a whole.

The complicated part about social interaction design is that it takes a combination of two difficult skills: one, the ability to make something look good (i.e. graphic design), and two, the analysis skills to know how to help shape the community through design. Personally, I believe I have skill number two. But as for number one, you might as well give a 2 year old some crayons and finger paints and they would do a better job then me.

Take LinkedIn as an example. Below is a screenshot of their invitation acceptance page.

Notice the naming of their buttons: “Accept”, “I Don’t Know [name]“, and “Decide Later”. Seems fine at first, right? The interesting part is that this invitation, like many I and others receive, was from someone I DID know, but didn’t want to accept because I barely knew him.

The way the my button choices are named, in some sense, forces me to accept the invitation because there is no option for what I really want to do (decline a person I DO know). The message LinkedIn is sending is that I should accept any invitation unless I have never met the person before.

The button combination with “I Don’t Know [name]” probably does optimize the number of acceptances and connections being made, but it pushes/encourages people to make connections that aren’t necessarily valuable. This contributes to network dilution, one of the major flaws of LinkedIn.

My point here is that even something as small as the naming of buttons can have a serious effect on a community. The importance of social interaction design is extremely high, especially during the early days when a community’s shape is just starting to take form. In the LinkedIn example, the combination of buttons was probably seen as the right result by a UI designer because it optimized the action of people accepting connections. But it is the wrong result for a social interaction designer because it is producing connections that hurt the value of the community.

[tags]Social Networking, Social Network, Design, Social Design, Social Interaction Design, Online Communities, LinkedIn, Brian Balfour[/tags]