Paper Reading #30: Life “Modes” in Social Media

Reference

Authors and Affiliations:

Fatih Kursat Ozenc,Carnegie Mellon UniversitySchool of Design,5000 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA

Shelly D. Farnham,Yahoo!,701 First Avenue Sunnyvale, CA

Presentation: CHI 2011, May 7–12, 2011, Vancouver, BC, Canada.

Summary

Hypothesis

This paper hypothesize that people organize their social worlds based on life ‘modes’, i.e., family, work and social. People strategically use communication technologies to manage intimacy levels within these modes, and levels of permeability through the boundaries between these modes.It also emphasizes strong need for focused sharing – the ability to share content only with appropriate audiences within certain areas of life.

Contents

The paper explores how to leverage natural models of social organization from people’s lives to improve their experiences of social media streams. The performed design research project examines how people might best a) organize their online content, b) transition between different areas of their lives online, and c) focus their sharing and consuming of online content within these areas. Finally researchers present different modalities like use of smartphones, division of space into social, work and home and other criteria to take into consideration while designing social media space.

Methods

The researchers performed in-depth, two-hour interviews to explore how people naturally mentally model different areas of their lives, how they incorporate communication technologies to support them, and how they might improve their online experiences of managing their social media streams. Each session consisted of a life mapping activity, a need validation session, and a visual metaphors ranking activity. The activities involved drawing diagrams related to important life activity, interviewing about positive and negative aspects of different concept scenarios and ranking each of the 6 visualization scenario.

Results

Most of the participants drew one of two types of maps, namely, a social meme or timeline map, for modeling their lives. The remaining used list view, and a pi-chart. The ratio for extremely segmented to extremely integrated life facets was one to one. Email was the area where segmentation was universal.Participants’ transitions from one area of life to another were most often concurrent with external transitions such as moving through time or moving from one place to another.

Focused sharing and consuming was preferred than organizing and transitioning. Reactions to the concept scenarios and rankings of visual metaphors pointed to a need for organization tools that prioritize different areas of lives in simple, dynamic, yet holistic ways.

Discussion

The paper presents results that we would have been able to predict or have been observing in our daily lives, like it was obvious that people prefer to use different email accounts for personal and business related works. However, the guidelines it provides might be really useful in designing the social space, given there has been lot of failures in designing social networks like Google Buzz. I was more impressed with the way authors highlighted mobile phones use because they are so popular and the applications for Facebook and Google Plus or Twitter do not provide the full fledged services of desktop application. Probably, this paper can convince people about creating better mobile applications for social networks.