Shelly Farnham
Biography
I am a Researcher in the Social Computing Group
at Microsoft Research, where
I study computer-mediated social interactions. I consider myself a social
engineer, building and evaluating prototypes in order to help people achieve
their social goals through technology. I am particularly interested in how to
enhance users’ experiences of online identity, community, and communication,
and how these experiences are best integrated into every day social practices.
Recent prototyping projects include tools that help people find, share, and
coordinate with each other using friend of a friend social networks. I earned
my Ph.D. in Social Psychology at the University of Washington, where I studied
the interplay between the self-concept, social environments, and behavior.
Position Paper
When designing social software, we must always take into
consideration the users’ social goals. People’s social goals are largely
affective in nature, relative to the more task-oriented goals of the knowledge
worker. People have three primary social goals that should be addressed in
social technologies:
Liking myself. The first primary social goal is that people
generally want to feel good about themselves. They will avoid technologies that
make them feel or appear bad, and seek out technologies that provide them with
a sense of mastery or the opportunity to construct an attractive persona. It is
important to note that technological features that are value-expressive, such
as a custom avatar, or a personalized skin, will prove enjoyable to the user
even in the absence of any observers. People find identity construction and
expression inherently enjoyable tasks, and the mere presence of self is
pleasing. We were particularly struck by this principle in observing reactions
to the Personal Map [16], a visualization of people’s social networks. People
found the user interface very attractive because the self was placed in the
middle of the map, and all of the users’ contacts were placed around the user. Placing
the user in the map was superfluous to its functionality, yet increased its
appeal considerably.
Sharing affection. The second primary social goal is that
people enjoy sharing and eliciting affection and approval from others. They
will seek out technologies that provide them with opportunities to find new
friends or dating partners, or to share with their existing family and friends.
Again, even the mere awareness of the presence of others will generally bring a
positive emotional response from users in a social system. We found in our
Swarm application [25] (a group text messaging system), for example, that
people enjoyed getting notifications of presence from their friends even if
they never acted upon the notification. Online reputation systems take
advantage of people’s desire to be liked and respected by providing numerical
or visual representations of people’s social status. These reputation
indicators are strong incentives for people to curry the favor of others within
the system [11, 45].
Sense of belonging. The third primary social goal is the
intrinsic joy people feel in experiencing similarity to others or in being a
part of social groups. A social group is quite sticky once people develop an
identification with the group. People favor their own social groups even if
those groups are arbitrarily and minimally defined (e.g., group X versus group
W, determined by coin toss) [73]. Thus people will seek out and use
technologies that increase their awareness of and identification with their
social groups. Technologies that list relationships or group affiliation will
provide an affectively positive experience to the user even in the absence of
any real functionality. It is remarkable, for example, how many Friendster
users have taken the time to provide rich profiles and develop large lists of
friends, or how many Tribe users have joined numerous groups, even though they
often have no explicit reason for being in the system aside from developing
their social affiliations.
That people will seek out and use technologies that enable
them to accomplish their social goals might seem an obvious point to make. However,
it is often the case that social software diverts the users’ attention away
from achieving their social goals, towards the software itself. If our systems
do not help people achieve their goals then they will not be successful, no
matter how attractive they appear or how fast they run. While we might hope to
delight the user upon introduction to a new system with a beautiful, usable
design, ultimately the software should become invisible to the user, because
they are thinking only about their desired outcome and not the system itself. For
example, when people are sharing photos with their friends, they are not
thinking primarily about the quality of the picture or the communication
transport; they are expressing to their friends: I like you, I miss you, I hope
you will enjoy sharing this experience with me.
When explicating social goals, it is important to take into
consideration both users’ explicit and implicit goals. For example, in
knowledge management systems in a corporate environment, people might explicitly
seek out the highest quality answer to a particular question they are posing to
the system. However, implicitly they might be hoping to develop
friendly, collaborative relationships with others within the corporation. In a
study of the use of social networks in a knowledge exchange situation, for
example, we found social status (defined by the number of people reporting up
to the person) was a strong predictor of whom people would ask for information,
irrespective of expertise [15]. This suggests that people are sensitive to the
social context of information, and a knowledge management system that simply
provided answers to a question without indicating the answer’s author would not
satisfy the users’ implicit social goals.
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