I’ve been thinking a lot about research methods for social design problems. For example, how do you research what goes on on Facebook? How does Facebook do this currently? I believe they use metrics from their data team — which I do not believe really uncover social interaction design issues.
How do you research how the unemployed find jobs? Surely they use their social networks. How do you research how to financial investors get advice from their community? How do you research consumer coffee drinking culture? How do you research how people shop for clothes? Shopping is one of the most social activities, even if it’s done alone. In fact the most social shoppers are elderly women: they shop with their deceased husbands in mind (“What would he have liked?”) and with their children in mind (“If I buy the cheaper shirt, I’ll have more to pass on to my daughter.”) But shopping for a dress might take several days to weeks before the purchase is actually made. What goes on in that time?
Okay, those are what I was referring to as “social design problems”. But what I care about is how we design for those things? I know very little about financial planners make decisions. I know my coffee drinking habits — but do I know yours? What about your shopping habits? Research is necessary to uncover all the nuances in our social behaviors, and is especially important to do right when working on such social design problems.
But how? Our user research methods have been fine tuned over the past decade so that we know exactly how to recruit the right sample, how to ask the right questions, and how many users to talk to to unveil most usability issues in an interface. I just don’t believe that we have the right methods yet for social interaction design issues.
How do we study a community that spans the online and offline world? How do we capture emotions, feelings, expectations, and privacy issues without biased research prompts. How do we understand social context?
I am not convinced that 5 users is enough for social interaction design issues — or for studying social interfaces. There are too many variations in people’s social behavior to capture everything in small samples. There are too many social contexts in which even the same user would respond differently. How many users is necessary? What is the best way to complement data metrics (quants) with qualitative user behavior?
I have been talking to several people about this recently and would love to hear from you. What social research methods do you use? How do you use them and what benefits do they provide? If you’re willing to share your methods, I am interested in collaborating with you to create a set of best practices here!
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I think one way to design for these social interaction is base design on observation.
One way I’ve done this is to simply create an open channels of communication, observe how people interact naturally, and then add structure around that to promote commonly understood and advantageous interactions.
Some people have good intuitions about what to do in a situation: think of the socially graceful friend at a party who is good at making introductions. Observing how these social leaders work, we can then emulate that behavior in design.
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