September 6, 2011 at 01:53Social Design Strategy
- Transfer
From a translator: This article was published by Eric Fisher , a Facebook evangelist, in May 2011 and formed the basis of Faceboo k 's Social Design Guide .
A product or service becomes outstanding if it offers its users the opportunity to implement some outstanding practice. And this is not a question of what users do in the service or how they do it, but rather a question of why they do what they do using the service. Why they regularly return to the service and why they tell their friends about it. Social design just answers this “why” question and explains how to create opportunities for implementing such outstanding practices.
Let me tell you a short story. Strand Book Store is a fairly well-known bookstore in New York. But I first learned about its existence (although I live in New York) only when at the beginning of this year I had a chance to walk nearby with my girlfriend, and she showed me it. She said that she regularly visits this store, and that I should like it too. And I really liked him. I even bought a book from one of my favorite authors there.
With the help of modern technologies, we can get answers to any questions very quickly. On my phone, I could easily get all the New York bookstores, determine the route to each of them, and also find out which of them sell books of my favorite author. But the value of social lies precisely in the fact that I can find even that which I didn’t even think of looking for.
When we come across questions such as: “Where to find a good Italian restaurant?” or “What movie should I see?”, or “Is there any outstanding museum nearby?” - In such situations, we always turn to our surroundings for help. After all, who else, besides the people around us, will be able to understand such subjective questions?
The circle of our friends acts as a kind of buffer between us and the rest of the world. In the wild, human communities arose in the process of evolution as a mechanism that protects us from all kinds of dangers: after all, a group is more powerful than an individual, and an individual can always turn to a group for social clues, what should he do in a given situation. To feel part of a community is to feel your emotional connection with these people. We feel such a connection primarily with loved ones who surround us: with our friends and with members of our family. We know these people, we like them, and they, in turn, also know us, and they also like us. We share with them our thoughts, feelings, experiences, and we always turn to them for love and support, because we trust them.
Despite all the variety of relationships that we enter into our lives — with colleagues or neighbors, with brands or organizations, whether long-term or short-lived, formal or intimate, all these relationships are built on trust. Social design is impossible without taking this fundamental principle into account.
When my close New York friend advises me a place worth visiting, I trust her opinion, because I am sure she knows me well. And when we receive recommendations that meet our expectations, we enjoy and learn something new. In this situation, we not only feel gratitude for the experience gained, but also feel the need to talk about it and share it with our friends. We do this because when we talk about things that we like, we express ourselves in this way and we want our surroundings to hear us.
Trust is built through everyday communication. Hundreds of millions of people interact in this way using Facebook or other social platforms: they share thoughts, feelings, places they visited, articles they read, movies they watched, etc. etc. The goal of social design is to be able to manage this communication, improve it, and be able to provide everyone with the opportunity of even more useful and valuable practice.
Social design operates with three key elements: personality, communication, and the human environment. In other words, it works with concepts such as: me, other people, and communication between me and other people.
I like to portray this in the form of three concentric circles: the person is placed in the center, communication lies in the middle, and the social environment is located at the edges. That's right, because communication acts as an adhesive between a person and his environment. Through communication, we build our identity in our social environment and receive feedback from it.
When developing a social product, you should always keep this picture in your head, start from the center and then move to the edges. First, let people build their identities, then give them the opportunity to talk about it and build a social environment in parallel. This is a very true approach: this is how Facebook and many other social networks started.
At its very beginning, in 2004, Facebook was a simple site where college students could only create and edit their profiles. This editing was contagious: people hung on the site to see what had changed in the profiles of their friends, and to change something in their own way too. Over time, this became a special form of communication, people gradually built strong identities and formed from them networks of friends and family members.
And now - when such a practice has become the daily routine of hundreds of millions of people - for social design it is more advisable to use the opposite approach: already go from the edges to the center. We must use the already formed communities, create new forms of communication and give people the opportunity to develop their identities further.
An iconographic depiction of the three components of social design: personality, communication, and the human environment. Communication is the glue that binds a person and his environment together.
Facebook profiles of people are their identities. People spend an infinite number of hours building their profiles: adding friends, posting photos, commenting on friends' posts. In fact, this is their self-representation, and they do not want to recreate the same thing from scratch in every new product or service.
Therefore, instead of creating a practice that would allow us to build our identity, we should use, if possible, what is already on Facebook and build a new practice on top of it. Connect users with their friends as soon as they register in the new service. Social applications will not be social without contacts with other people, moreover, the creation of connections with friends that already exist in the user brings to the community the previously formed trust. Use the information from existing people's profiles to recommend new content to them - people already know what they like, otherwise this would not be in their profiles. All that remains to be done next is to establish communication: to understand what people will talk about and how they will do it.
Rotten tomato, for example, shows the user films that his friends liked - in addition to personal recommendations issued to him based on those films that he liked before.
Communication breeds trust. In fact, any interaction that takes place in real time and is associated with emotions creates strong bonds. The interaction can be very different: as a conversation on the bench - and dance, as participation in a protest - and a joint parachute jump. Communication is simply a more general term that I use to explain the interaction between the individual and the social environment. And the stronger the emotions experienced by a person when interacting with someone, the stronger the bond formed between them. Communication is reciprocating and consists of two practices that affect one another: in general, we can call them listening and speaking .
An example of listening practice is when you come to a restaurant you have never been to and order something to eat based on the recommendations of others. You listen to what is being said in your environment and what they are doing in it, so that later on the basis of what you hear, you make your own choice.
We see this in many online services. On Yelp, for example, you can find comments on restaurants, such as "Try hot chocolate here." On YouTube, we see the rating of each video, and this helps us choose what to watch, because we most likely will not want to watch the bad. A good rating, as it were, tells us: “Look at this, because others liked it.” In online stores like Amazon, we also see similar things: people's reviews of products that help us make our choices.
But here a big problem arises: we don’t know all these people at all, and they don’t know us . How do they understand what we like? How can we trust the rating they have formed? We cannot trust them because there is not enough trust between us.
Facebook solves this problem through your circle of friends. Social plugins , for example, provide people with the opportunity to “like” a variety of things on the Internet and show this activity to their friends. And we are most likely interested in what our surroundings we trust like.
I repeat once again, the value of social is manifested at the moment when we do not know in advance what we want and do not specifically look for anything, but still we find topics for communication and things interesting to us. This happens when our environment regularly shares their experiences with us. We learn by watching others. The principle of social mimicry and incitement to action works: when we see that the one we trust does something, we will most likely do the same.
Spotify , for example, shows the flow of all the songs that users add to their playlists or which they share with each other. This allows users to see the freshest and most popular songs.
When you log in with Facebook on the Huffington Post, you see a stream of articles your friends read recently.
The other part of communication - and perhaps the most important part of it - is speaking. People are active when they have the right motivation for this. At the same time, we know that when people share their experience with those whom they trust, they tend to do it more often and be more open and honest.
On Facebook, there are many ways to engage users in activity: they are provided with several possible types of publications (statuses, links, photos, etc.), as well as various feedback methods (likes, comments, answers to questions, publications on the wall, etc.). P.). And all this activity is continuously shown to the user's friends through different channels.
The more people manifest themselves in the system, the more activities that can be listened to and which can be involved. And similarly, the more activities that you can get involved in, the more people show themselves. This process creates a continuous, exponentially growing, feedback loop. This is really great: communication is fueling even more communication.
Summing up, we can say that outstanding social practice depends on the communication that arises between our environment and us. To create such a practice, you need to be able to implement three basic things:
The appeal of social design is that it deals with the most powerful form of motivation: the human self, its identity. We share our experience and interact with others because we thus learn more about ourselves and because we feel better when we know that we have been heard.
Social design essentially deals with the central part of Maslow’s needs pyramid., in my opinion. Once our physiological needs for food and water, as well as our needs for security are satisfied, we have two interesting related needs: the need for love and ownership, and the need for recognition. But getting recognition is directly related to the way our environment sees us, for whom it recognizes us. In other words, the community governs our identity. And we feel love and ownership just when we can receive recognition and reveal our full potential.
The practice of realizing the mentioned needs, of course, already exists in the real world, and we are not trying to discover something “new” here. But the Internet is becoming a part of the real world and more and more reflects it, and the means by which we communicate with each other are becoming more effective. People immersed in the network, more and more practices that then occur in the real world, initially implement online. When designing social platforms, we must keep this in mind at all times. We should take into account existing social laws, taking care of identities and their environments, on which we influence and for which we create our means of communication.
After all, the value of the social is far more than anything material. With the help of the social, we can satisfy our social needs - just as we satisfied our physical needs. We no longer need to worry about food and hunt all our lives, as other animals do. We have learned to trust each other and work together, thus creating a safer space for life. But each of us individually still suffers from the uncertainty of the future, seeks love, wants to be heard and know ourselves. Social design can help with this.
A product or service becomes outstanding if it offers its users the opportunity to implement some outstanding practice. And this is not a question of what users do in the service or how they do it, but rather a question of why they do what they do using the service. Why they regularly return to the service and why they tell their friends about it. Social design just answers this “why” question and explains how to create opportunities for implementing such outstanding practices.
Let me tell you a short story. Strand Book Store is a fairly well-known bookstore in New York. But I first learned about its existence (although I live in New York) only when at the beginning of this year I had a chance to walk nearby with my girlfriend, and she showed me it. She said that she regularly visits this store, and that I should like it too. And I really liked him. I even bought a book from one of my favorite authors there.
With the help of modern technologies, we can get answers to any questions very quickly. On my phone, I could easily get all the New York bookstores, determine the route to each of them, and also find out which of them sell books of my favorite author. But the value of social lies precisely in the fact that I can find even that which I didn’t even think of looking for.
When we come across questions such as: “Where to find a good Italian restaurant?” or “What movie should I see?”, or “Is there any outstanding museum nearby?” - In such situations, we always turn to our surroundings for help. After all, who else, besides the people around us, will be able to understand such subjective questions?
The circle of our friends acts as a kind of buffer between us and the rest of the world. In the wild, human communities arose in the process of evolution as a mechanism that protects us from all kinds of dangers: after all, a group is more powerful than an individual, and an individual can always turn to a group for social clues, what should he do in a given situation. To feel part of a community is to feel your emotional connection with these people. We feel such a connection primarily with loved ones who surround us: with our friends and with members of our family. We know these people, we like them, and they, in turn, also know us, and they also like us. We share with them our thoughts, feelings, experiences, and we always turn to them for love and support, because we trust them.
Despite all the variety of relationships that we enter into our lives — with colleagues or neighbors, with brands or organizations, whether long-term or short-lived, formal or intimate, all these relationships are built on trust. Social design is impossible without taking this fundamental principle into account.
When my close New York friend advises me a place worth visiting, I trust her opinion, because I am sure she knows me well. And when we receive recommendations that meet our expectations, we enjoy and learn something new. In this situation, we not only feel gratitude for the experience gained, but also feel the need to talk about it and share it with our friends. We do this because when we talk about things that we like, we express ourselves in this way and we want our surroundings to hear us.
Trust is built through everyday communication. Hundreds of millions of people interact in this way using Facebook or other social platforms: they share thoughts, feelings, places they visited, articles they read, movies they watched, etc. etc. The goal of social design is to be able to manage this communication, improve it, and be able to provide everyone with the opportunity of even more useful and valuable practice.
Three elements of social design
Social design operates with three key elements: personality, communication, and the human environment. In other words, it works with concepts such as: me, other people, and communication between me and other people.
I like to portray this in the form of three concentric circles: the person is placed in the center, communication lies in the middle, and the social environment is located at the edges. That's right, because communication acts as an adhesive between a person and his environment. Through communication, we build our identity in our social environment and receive feedback from it.
When developing a social product, you should always keep this picture in your head, start from the center and then move to the edges. First, let people build their identities, then give them the opportunity to talk about it and build a social environment in parallel. This is a very true approach: this is how Facebook and many other social networks started.
At its very beginning, in 2004, Facebook was a simple site where college students could only create and edit their profiles. This editing was contagious: people hung on the site to see what had changed in the profiles of their friends, and to change something in their own way too. Over time, this became a special form of communication, people gradually built strong identities and formed from them networks of friends and family members.
And now - when such a practice has become the daily routine of hundreds of millions of people - for social design it is more advisable to use the opposite approach: already go from the edges to the center. We must use the already formed communities, create new forms of communication and give people the opportunity to develop their identities further.
An iconographic depiction of the three components of social design: personality, communication, and the human environment. Communication is the glue that binds a person and his environment together.Using Communities
Facebook profiles of people are their identities. People spend an infinite number of hours building their profiles: adding friends, posting photos, commenting on friends' posts. In fact, this is their self-representation, and they do not want to recreate the same thing from scratch in every new product or service.
Therefore, instead of creating a practice that would allow us to build our identity, we should use, if possible, what is already on Facebook and build a new practice on top of it. Connect users with their friends as soon as they register in the new service. Social applications will not be social without contacts with other people, moreover, the creation of connections with friends that already exist in the user brings to the community the previously formed trust. Use the information from existing people's profiles to recommend new content to them - people already know what they like, otherwise this would not be in their profiles. All that remains to be done next is to establish communication: to understand what people will talk about and how they will do it.
Rotten tomato, for example, shows the user films that his friends liked - in addition to personal recommendations issued to him based on those films that he liked before.Building communication
Communication breeds trust. In fact, any interaction that takes place in real time and is associated with emotions creates strong bonds. The interaction can be very different: as a conversation on the bench - and dance, as participation in a protest - and a joint parachute jump. Communication is simply a more general term that I use to explain the interaction between the individual and the social environment. And the stronger the emotions experienced by a person when interacting with someone, the stronger the bond formed between them. Communication is reciprocating and consists of two practices that affect one another: in general, we can call them listening and speaking .
Hearing
An example of listening practice is when you come to a restaurant you have never been to and order something to eat based on the recommendations of others. You listen to what is being said in your environment and what they are doing in it, so that later on the basis of what you hear, you make your own choice.
We see this in many online services. On Yelp, for example, you can find comments on restaurants, such as "Try hot chocolate here." On YouTube, we see the rating of each video, and this helps us choose what to watch, because we most likely will not want to watch the bad. A good rating, as it were, tells us: “Look at this, because others liked it.” In online stores like Amazon, we also see similar things: people's reviews of products that help us make our choices.
But here a big problem arises: we don’t know all these people at all, and they don’t know us . How do they understand what we like? How can we trust the rating they have formed? We cannot trust them because there is not enough trust between us.
Facebook solves this problem through your circle of friends. Social plugins , for example, provide people with the opportunity to “like” a variety of things on the Internet and show this activity to their friends. And we are most likely interested in what our surroundings we trust like.
I repeat once again, the value of social is manifested at the moment when we do not know in advance what we want and do not specifically look for anything, but still we find topics for communication and things interesting to us. This happens when our environment regularly shares their experiences with us. We learn by watching others. The principle of social mimicry and incitement to action works: when we see that the one we trust does something, we will most likely do the same.
Spotify , for example, shows the flow of all the songs that users add to their playlists or which they share with each other. This allows users to see the freshest and most popular songs. When you log in with Facebook on the Huffington Post, you see a stream of articles your friends read recently.Speaking
The other part of communication - and perhaps the most important part of it - is speaking. People are active when they have the right motivation for this. At the same time, we know that when people share their experience with those whom they trust, they tend to do it more often and be more open and honest.
On Facebook, there are many ways to engage users in activity: they are provided with several possible types of publications (statuses, links, photos, etc.), as well as various feedback methods (likes, comments, answers to questions, publications on the wall, etc.). P.). And all this activity is continuously shown to the user's friends through different channels.
The more people manifest themselves in the system, the more activities that can be listened to and which can be involved. And similarly, the more activities that you can get involved in, the more people show themselves. This process creates a continuous, exponentially growing, feedback loop. This is really great: communication is fueling even more communication.
Summing up, we can say that outstanding social practice depends on the communication that arises between our environment and us. To create such a practice, you need to be able to implement three basic things:
- Use personal information from the profile and communications developed by the user to create a personal space for him
- Develop maximum communication between people, demonstrate the social context of this communication and show any activity
- Make it really simple - the ability to talk, share your experiences, give feedback and be involved
Building identity
The appeal of social design is that it deals with the most powerful form of motivation: the human self, its identity. We share our experience and interact with others because we thus learn more about ourselves and because we feel better when we know that we have been heard.
Social design essentially deals with the central part of Maslow’s needs pyramid., in my opinion. Once our physiological needs for food and water, as well as our needs for security are satisfied, we have two interesting related needs: the need for love and ownership, and the need for recognition. But getting recognition is directly related to the way our environment sees us, for whom it recognizes us. In other words, the community governs our identity. And we feel love and ownership just when we can receive recognition and reveal our full potential.
The practice of realizing the mentioned needs, of course, already exists in the real world, and we are not trying to discover something “new” here. But the Internet is becoming a part of the real world and more and more reflects it, and the means by which we communicate with each other are becoming more effective. People immersed in the network, more and more practices that then occur in the real world, initially implement online. When designing social platforms, we must keep this in mind at all times. We should take into account existing social laws, taking care of identities and their environments, on which we influence and for which we create our means of communication.
After all, the value of the social is far more than anything material. With the help of the social, we can satisfy our social needs - just as we satisfied our physical needs. We no longer need to worry about food and hunt all our lives, as other animals do. We have learned to trust each other and work together, thus creating a safer space for life. But each of us individually still suffers from the uncertainty of the future, seeks love, wants to be heard and know ourselves. Social design can help with this.