Paper Reading #30: Life "modes" in social media

Fatih Kursat Ozenc represented the School of Design from Carnegie Mellon University.
Shelly D. Farnham represented Yahoo!.

This paper was presented at CHI 2011.

Summary


Hypothesis
The researcher's hypothesis was that people organize their life into different groups based on social interaction.

Methods
To prove their hypothesis, researchers set out to conduct a design research study. In this study, they investigated how users interact with social media as well as how they interact with different social groups.

With each participant, they had a two hour in-depth interview to attempt to ascertain how the participant interacted and viewed each social circle. One of the exercises in this study was to draw out pictures or graphs of how the participant viewed certain aspects of their life. The goal was to have users visually map out important areas of their life. By looking at these maps, the researchers were able to find similarities between participants.

Another exercise they performed was through participant evaluation of certain scenarios and storyboards.  These scenarios had to do with boundaries and limitations of interactions. Participants were asked what they liked and disliked about each scenario. They were also asked what they might change.

Results
The result of the first study showed that participants preferred two different types of map. The first being a "social meme" type map. This map looked like some sort of graph. The center node of the graph contained the person and had different social circles and activities drawn off the connected nodes. The next time of map was the timeline map. Users drew this map with daily activities in order of occurrence.

As far as communication practices went, researchers found that the participants often used different types of communication media for different social circles. A user might use a certain set of communication channels (facebook, texting, etc) to interact with one of their social circles, while using a completely different communication channel set for another group.

Based on all these results, the researchers also enumerated various design suggestions for creating new social media and allowing for better social interaction with technology.

Discussion
Aspects of this paper area already being used frequently in social media. One large example was Google's been launch of Google+. Google+ allows users to place their "friends" into social circles according to where they fit. Then, users can choose what circle they want to share information with. This is very much in line with what the researchers of this paper were suggesting.