Lecture 4: Social Interaction Dr. Xiangyu WANG August 18 th, 2008

Why do we socialize in real life?

Examples of social technologies  Digital cities, community networks, portals such as eBay and Slashdot, and older technologies based on electronic bulletin board systems, newsgroups and mailing lists are just some of the examples of social interaction spaces.

Web as A Social Technology  Web technology (e.g., blog and wiki) can play an important role in enabling people to interact with each other.  The Web could afford sharing information and for connecting people to people.  Not just work together, better social interaction benefit working together.

Web as A Social Technology  A social technology should enable people to: Share experiences Expose tacit knowledge Make recommendations Discuss different topics Get to know other people Work together …

Importance of social interaction  Design performance is also based on social process.  On-task and off-task during collaborative work: Is coffee machine conversation off-task?

Sociability  Sociability is the degree of promotion of a social space or a network.  How computer-supported collaborative environments differ in their ability to facilitate the emergence of a social space?  What promote social interaction, social space? One thing is trust. A second aspect is belonging. The willingness to give oneself up for the greater cause, the cause of the team. Example: Lance Armstrong's team A third is temporal and physical proximity. We can see who was where doing what when.

Repeated social interactions  Repeated social interactions are important for: increasing familiarity, developing relationships, reminding people about what they have in common, strengthening ties to an organization helping to develop a positive regard for the social system

Case Study of an Example for Social Interaction  CHIplace: developed for the ACM CHI 2002 conference to “extend the interaction opportunities…”

CHIplace:

Challenges for CHIplace  Encouraging user participation  Promoting visibility of people and their activities

Encouraging participation  Sustain awareness of what is new (e.g. devoted area in the site, newsletter sent to interested people, different forms of notification)  Identifying participation: Recognizing, identifying and attributing participation has been shown to be valuable for encouraging participation  Differences between registered users and non registered ones

Promoting visibility  persistent and up-to-date identity and community governance system in place

Promoting visibility  Traces of explicit and implicit actions (e.g. CHIplace trivia) “empowers authors and readers by recognizing the author’s efforts and the readers’ interest”

Promoting visibility  Social browsing tools List of people that joined most recently (with picture) Gallery of selected pictures of members People directories sorted, e.g., by last name or country Grouping of people with similar roles (HCIplace)