October 6, 2010

Defining a Social Media Experience - Part 1 - Understanding the Platform

Designing social media experiences has been the most challenging work I've done as an information architect / user experience designer.

The complexity of creating good social experiences varies with the specific goals of your project, of course, but it is frequently the case that the difficulty of planning and executing a solid social experience is underestimated.

My experience working in social media definition has taught me that the complexity of working in this space is due to AT LEAST four (and probably more) factors:

Technical - gaining and maintaining an understanding of the capabilities of the platform or framework
Human - designing an application or community that is a desirable place for human beings to pass time and do stuff
Time - producing an application at a pace 16 times faster than the time you have available
Documentation - deciding how much is enough and what the appropriate approach is

Over the course of the next four posts, I will explain how I've found each of these factors combine to make social media application design extremely difficult and offer some strategies and resources that I turned to when I needed to come up with answers to these challenges.

Part 1: Technical

It is true that a lot of development work can be saved because you are frequently working with an existing framework of some kind - so it is unlikely that your development team will have to create, say, a way of uploading photos or videos from scratch.

Unfortunately, I've found that when you are trying to define the functionality of an application within that framework, whether it be a platform like Facebook, or an out-of-the-box community platform like Jive, there is no shortcut for a UX designer to understanding all the nitty-gritty details about how the framework works.

Getting to this understanding quickly requires very rapid research if you're starting from zero, and constant participation in the platform and monitoring of developer blogs and social media news channels if you're not. The simple fact is: the more you understand about how the system works, the more you can understand where possibilities exist and how changes will affect your work.

To create truly exciting and innovative experiences, you need to have a strong and visionary development team - folks that live and breathe the platform in question have knowledge of current and upcoming features, and can test out if things that are desirable are possible.

Social software and platforms change every five minutes, so keeping on top of these changes for any particular platform (especially Facebook) is almost a full time job on its own. This rapidity of change makes it difficult to understand multiple platforms at once - meaning that you should either specialize in one platform or practice skills that enable you to gain quick understanding of any given platform. Either way is feasible with their own pros and cons, though I myself prefer the generalist approach.

Here's a collection of links that can provide good starting points for understanding a variety of popular platforms and frameworks:

Facebook