This document discusses psychology research on social media and its implications for design. It summarizes two projects: CoCollage, which promoted community in cafes through a shared online collage, and Pathable, which enabled social networking and community building at conferences. CoCollage studies found it increased place attachment and interactions over time for those seeking new connections. Pathable helped attendees meet goals by providing profiles, matchmaking, and tools to seed and nurture online and offline communities before, during and after events. The research emphasized understanding user goals and social contexts to design technologies that facilitate real-world relationships and communities.

1. Psychology of Social Media: Implication for Design Shelly D. Farnham, Ph.D. Dec 03 2009 Yahoo

2. Agenda My background and approach Psychology of social media Brief overview of past research trajectory Deeper discussion of two recent projects –> technology and building real world community CoCollage Pathable

4. Research and Development Process meeting social goals

5. Core Problem Human social behavior evolved in different context than what we have today We are still figuring out how to interact via tech How is it different? How do we make it even better?

6. Why Interact through Technology? At a distance, over time Access to greater number of people More frequent, continues access Interactions archived Integrate with digital content Identity and context manipulation Large scale collaboration, coordination

7. Social Psychological Approach Understanding users Individuals Social dynamics: pairs, groups, networks Social engineering Technologies as social environments Technologies as interventions Socially intelligent Use understanding of social processes to inform design

8. Example Design goal: a profile and matchmaking system to increase likelihood of two people finding each other and having a successful dating experience

9. Understanding Attraction Predictors of attraction similarity frequency of exposure People I like like you (Balance theory) Predictors of matching Similarity of “level” (matching hypothesis) Process Reciprocal self-disclosure

10. Impact on Design Match on similarity in demographics, lifestyle Provide opportunities for frequent exposure, interaction Match based on equivalence in desirability Put in social context (see friends, friends of friends) Varying levels of communication: pseudonymous, identified, asynchronous, realtime

11. Design Principles Defining user’s goals Social goals To like myself That others like me Sense of belonging Mastery, self-efficacy Implicit vs. explicit

12. Design Principles Take perspective of user What is there, and what think is there, not always the same People respond to what they *think* is there Behavior is function of person and situation To predict and change behavior, must understand all the forces Some internal, some physical, MANY SOCIAL http://synapticstimuli.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/force_fields.jpg

13. Design Principles The best social technologies are “invisible” to the user need usability, to achieve sociability Social translucence Visibility, awareness, accountability

15. In terms of importance to self

18. Similarity based on interaction behavior, co-occurrence in communication groups

19. Enables dynamic network

20. Extract meaningful collections/groups via cluster analysisPersonal Map Point to Point Wallop

22. Provide sense of who’s important

23. Dynamic, changes as levels of interaction change

24. Minimal maintenance requiredSimilarity (A B) = (sum (AB * significance))/sqrt(A * B) Grouped using hierarchical cluster analysis Shelly Farnham::Will Portnoy

25. Point to Point User Studiesfacilitate knowledge exchange by exploiting corporate social network information At Microsoft: 75,000 mailing lists, each person belongs to on average 11 mailing lists Social network info presented relative to self Shelly Farnham::Will Portnoy

26. Point to Point User Study I 39 employees completed task Participants listed 15 closest co-workers, used to assess accuracy of point to point map People most similar to the user tended to also be on the user’s list of coworkers. People most similar to the user were not crossed off map as not belonging.

27. Point to Point User Study II 17 employees completed 16 choices using Point to Point Study design: Participants decided between two randomly selected people whom they would like to meet for knowledge exchange network information affected decision-making

28. Mobile Social and Hyper-coordination:Supporting Life Cycle of Events Joe Joe Amy Joe Amy Amy Bob Bob Jen Jen Jen Bob Apart Together Apart (Repeat) Slam: Groups, messaging, photo sharing for the smartphone Swarm: Group Text messaging Shelly to coffee: caffeine?

29. Groove Field Deployment Study After Katrina hurricane, economy at a stand still, largely evacuated Microsoft effort, Groove deployment to relief workers Secure, peer to peer collaboration Enables sharing and synchronization across locations, while mobile, with intermittent Internet access Ideal for ad hoc, cross organizational collaboration

30. Waggle Labs (2006-2009) Social Media R&D Consulting and Incubation Pathable Swaggle (group text messaging) Zillow community Trusera CoCollage (Strands) Facebook analysis Social Web 2.0 Reality AllStarz Teen Focus Group (MSR) City of Seattle MyTwee

32. Distribution of Daily Activity in Top Applications, Measured in Share of Total Daily Active Usage (28.4 million total, averaged for week ending 11/18/07) User Goals for Facebook Apps

33. CoCollage The Strands Community Collage (CoCollage™) promotes awareness, interactions and communityin third places where people seek conversation and connection. Web site for sharing and conversation Large display showing “Community Collage”

34. Third Places Semi-public places away from home (first places) and work (second places) People gather to enjoy conversation with friends and strangers Facilitate community development frequent serendipitous interactions increased likelihood of developing web of interpersonal relationships

35. Existing “Technologies” for Community Development in Third Places Challenging to get to know who comes regularly over time, what they are like, and start conversations

36. CoCollage: Expanding Impact of Place web site large display synchronous awareness and conversation in cafe asynchronous awareness, sharing and conversation in café or at home

37. CoCollage Features Uploading People and profiles Commenting, voting Messaging Shared items (photos & quotes) The big screen

38. Early Deployment Study Procedure Deploy to local coffee shop: Trabant, working closely with owners Observations, interviews and questionnaire Goals develop a better understanding of the psycho-social factors that would impact adoption and use get immediate feedback for iteratively improving design explore how best to measure place-based community development for future studies

39. Factors Expected to Influence Adoption and Use The size and activity of the existing community the extent to which the individual has a desire to meet others through the café the individual’s existing levels of psychological sense of communityandplace attachment to the café

40. Place Attachment Rosenbaum et al. in study of a suburban diner People who experienced social support through diner, developed place attachment – bond between person and place Used items that loaded highly on three factors: Functional dependency: “I get more satisfaction out of Trabant than other cafes” Commitment: “I really care about the fate of Trabant” Identification with self: “The success of Trabant is my success” Sense of Community Place Attachment

41. Questionnaire: Existing Community Size of their existing café network: 58% had at least one acquaintance in café, of those averaging 4.2 each 25% had at least one personal friend, of those averaging 2.8 each Psycho social factors: Satisfied with café (M = 5.6)* Lukewarm in sense of community (M = 3.5)* Place attachment on dependency (M = 5.4)* and commitment (M = 5.3)* factors, but less so on identity (M = 3.4)* Desire to connect with others 56% had some or more interest in meeting others at the café suggests roughly half of regulars would want to join CoCollage *on scale of 1 to 7, where 1 = not at all and 7 = extremely so

42. Raw Correlations Bolded items are statistically significant at p < .05. Of 69 who completed questionnaire, 24 also joined CoCollage Sense of community, place attachment, and desire to connect correlated with whether joined CoCollage

44. Primary usage:

45. create a profile

46. browse other profiles

47. upload images

48. View others’ images

49. Significant correlation between desire to make friends and

50. number of comments (r = .43, p < .05)

52. A Month Later: Impact on Neighboring

53. CoCollage Study Conclusions Within first month, decent adoption 82 out of roughly 400 regulars joined CoCollage in the first month Questionnaire results shows that people who a) are looking to connect with others b) already have a psychological sense of community at the café c) already feel place attachment to the café, are more likely to join CoCollage and start conversations CoCollage did have impact on attachment and neighboring over time Psychological sense of community for place and place attachment are meaningful constructs in predicting adoption of a place-based community technology

54. Pathable: Leveraging Social Media for Professional Social Networking Whom do I most want to meet, in the limited time available to me? How do I meet them? EIBTM’s WorldWide Technology Watch Award for 2009

55. Social Networking at Events World wide over 1.2 million professional events each year, adding up to a hundred billion dollar industry Why? Learning Meeting people! Forming connections with clients and colleagues Face-to-face for developing trust face-to-face for informal idea and knowledge sharing via conversation

56. Building Community at Events In early interviews with conference organizers, they listed building community as a primary goal Why do event attendees and event hosts at professional events care about building community?

58. Powerfully increase social capital through simple act of joining community

60. Designing Pathable: Leveraging Social Media for Face to Face Professional Social Networking Whom do I most want to meet, in the limited time available to me? How do I meet them? How do we become a “social tie”? How do we become a community?

61. Who is here? Who do I want to meet?

62. Social Networks Social Scientist Media Startup Research SocialTech Community RealityAllStar BlogHer Blogger startup community social technology blogger

65. Exploration at Seattle Mind Camp 3 75 people provided tags for self, organization, related people, related events

66. Pathable Community and social networking tools for conferences Community Dashboard  Profiles Attendee directory Match-making Messaging Integration (blog, twitter, LinkedIn) Wiki (Wetpaint) Schedule

67. Design Themes The event host is a connector and community moderator Rich information with minimal effort Social tags are used as pivots of awareness, connection, and communication Professional match matching for improved people finding Incorporate communication back channels

68. Profile Per event

71. Conversation To all, or tags Subscribe to mailing list

72. Contacts Added through bookmarking

73. Tweet Stream Live updates

75. Host Manager

76. Face to Face Integration Using existing technologies: Mobile Badges Printable calendar Visualization

77. Personalized Badge

78. Match-making Best matches possible, with minimal effort in profiles Based on predictors of successful matches: Common interests Same roles Job title Host provided categories Co-location By geography By events Existing shared groups and communities Weighted sum to produce ordered list

79. Pathable BarCamp Seattle Study Questions: how important is social networking at events can Pathable help? BarCamp Seattle is a free, two-day conference held for Web 2.0 280 people registered for the event using Pathable 78 people total (76% male and 24% female) completed the questionnaire, 18 at the event and 60 afterwards online

80. Primary Goal in Coming to Event

81. Correlations between Event Features and Intention to Return Sense of community and event attachment highly correlation r = .81 Bolded items are statistically significant at p < .05.

82. Pathable Usage Everyone registered through Pathable, about half actively used the system 60% actively browsed directory 47% actively browsed messages 19% actively sent messages 43% intended to use directory after event 55% intended to use communication features after event If they said they came to event only to learn, less likely to use Pathable (t = 2.6, p < .02) The higher the usage, the more they said it helped them meet people (r = .65, p < .001) No correlation between usage and raw count of people met Usage correlated with count of professional friends at event (r = .36, p < .01) **percentages for those who indicated at least somewhat or quite a bit

83. Impact on Professional Network

84. Impact on Attachment and Sense of Community

85. Impact of Usage by Feature Pathable helped attendees meet others the more they browsed the attendee directory (r = .37, p < .005) the more they browsed attendee messages (r = .43, p < .005) the more they sent messages (r =.54, p < .005) the more they used the match-making feature (r = .66, p < .005)

87. Can create an active community with minimal effort

88. Two emails

89. Seeded initial profiles

91. Leveraging Match-making Features Nurturing tags Use badges Use color coded categories Provides overview Easy point of conversation Examples Job types: developer, designer, marketer Interests: blogging, podcasting, and mobile Person types: creative vs. geek Personality: introvert, extrovert Integrate with face to face Introductions Birds of a feather meetings

92. People Loved Badges and blogged about them!

93. Themes and Conclusions Mission Help people meet goals through social technologies Incorporate psychology of social media Clearly define user goals Examine psycho-social context of technology to influence design Prototyping and *early* deployment to assess technology’s ability to meet goals Broad conclusions Important to map natural social processes into social technologies People are *always* seeking to develop social relationships, even in professional environments people, networks, and groups as primary content Networking and community technologies can and SHOULD meaningfully impact face-to-face interactions