Topic 1 – Underlying principles

Exercise 1: What is social networking.

When I think social networking I immediately think a) Facebook and then b) Linked In.  It is a recent phenomenon and almost seems like a fad – much like something such as reality TV.  In reality though, people have been using computers to facilitate social interaction for decades, usually a virtual form of something that already exists in ‘physical’ space.

As I mentioned in my introduction post, although I have already designed a site that facilitates a community – it did so in a fairly static way.  And as I am in the UX game, I am really hoping to gain a better understanding of the cognitive and social aspects of online communities.  A study into online communities and social networks will certainly change my professional practice by providing a framework from which to design interfaces and interactions in my day-to-day job.

Boxes and arrows is an online user experience magazine which I often refer to in my professional life and it has an interesting article titled “Social networks and group formation” (Singh, 2007).  In this article Singh discusses tie strength (strong, weak and absent) and then outlines the 3 competing theories for measuring centralisation (the importance of someone in a social network): Degree of point, control and independence.  In defining social networks he quotes Garton et al. (1997) as saying “a set of people (or organizations or other social entities) connected by a set of social relationships, such as friendship, co-working or information exchange.”

I didn’t find it as easy to come across good articles for online communities as for social networks so running out of time, couldn’t find a better source than wikipedia.  It used the definition (“Virtual community”, n.d.) “a group of people that primarily interact via communication media such as newsletters, telephone, email, internet social network service or instant messages rather than face to face, for social, professional, educational or other purposes.”

In terms of developing online communities (as opposed to just supporting them), I think social network platforms provide the opportunity to build the weak links that really provide value to its participants.

Exercise 2: Social networking taxonomy.

I first really considered the concept of folksonomy when designing Barclaycard last year (http://www.barclaycard.co.uk/mybarclaycard/preview/).  One of the underpinning concepts of this design is the ability to analyse your credit card transactions to get a better understanding of your spending.  By matching merchant ID’s to transactions, we were able to create categories for transactions which could then be presented to users as a visual representation of their credit card statements (e.g. pie chart of their spending broken into groceries, bills, entertiainment etc).  In addition to this ‘pre-canned’ taxonomy for categorising transactions, we also allowed users to create their own tags for their transactions.  By then making these custom tags available to others in similar circumstances (e.g. informing a user that most people tagged transactions from a particular merchant as health care), a ‘Folksonomy’ was able to emerge which was a taxonomy created by all of the users of the system rather than engineered up-front.  The tag cloud seems to be one of the information design devices of choice when visualising folksonomies.

My categorisation/tagging scheme is my current social networking taxonomy but I expect that as I read the blogs of my fellow students that I will see categories and tags that I think make sense for a given topic and evolve my scheme accordingly.  This is a rudimentary form of folksonomy but still one all the same.

Exercise 3: An heuristic experience

1. I have chosen to review barclays.co.uk as this is the public site of the online banking system that I am currently designing.

2. Ran through the form – it would have been helpful to have more description information in context.  Even as someone who does these types of reviews fairly regularly I still always refer to it for clarification and examples.

3. Results are as follows:

Subject: Barclays public site: Nielsen’s Heuristic Evaluation
Sender: andrew.wight@gmail.com
From: andrew.wight@gmail.com (NHE)

system=Barclays public site
date=2009-08-11 17:15:40
comment=Heuristic evaluation of barclays.co.uk for ITC510
q1=6
c1=Follows typical conventions
q2=5
c2=Terms are typically simple and user-centric,
q3=6
c3=User’s current location in the site is well sign posted
q4=7
c4=Pages follow a consistent template
q5=6
q6=0
q7=5
c7=Login on homepage but no specific goal-oriented links
q8=
c8=Error messages are not specific enough
q9=5
c9=Error messages are immediate (rather than later in the process).  Better contextual help would prevent them further
q10=6
c10=Thorough help system – could be better utilzed inline rather than as a separate section.

Singh, S. (2007). Social Networks and group formation: Theoretical concepts to leverage. Retreived 6 August, 2009, from http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/social-networks.

Virtual community. (n.d.).  Retreived 6 August, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_community.