Summary
“Social Translucence: An Approach to Designing Systems that Support Social Processes” discusses the design of interfaces that support meaningful communication on a large scale. Erickson and Kellogg describe the importance of social translucence – characterized by visibility, awareness, and translucence – in digital systems that allow users to enrich their social experiences. Social translucence allows interactions of online users to mimic physical interactions in the real world by following three design approaches: realist, mimetic, and abstract. Decisions users make are dependent on their environment, which is why awareness and visibility of other users is important to incorporate in the design of an online social platform.
In “The Chat Circle Series: Explorations in designing abstract graphical communication interfaces,” authors Donath and Viegas explore the design behind the interfaces of graphical chat programs using Chat Circles. These Chat Circles are a minimalist design environment (using shapes, text, colors, and images) that are influenced by environment, communication channel, individual representation, history, movement, and context. Furthermore, Chat Circles can reveal information such as how frequent users post, what times they post, popular topics of discussion, ambiance of a conversation or topic, and user movement throughout chats.
Reflection
The details of “Social Translucence” about social awareness and the environment that we are in was something I never thought about because though I often communicate online, I do so without much thought to the design of the platform itself. In hindsight, the environment we communicate in does definitely play a large part in how we communicate. For instance, on Instagram, Twitter , and Facebook, we create the environment we are a part of by friending, following, and chatting with certain people that we choose. Updating your status via images or text can also support group awareness; your friends and family are curious as to what you’re doing or what you did. Introducing physical interactions to online interactions was also a fascinating concept to me because obviously aspects of communication such as body language aren’t evident online, but voice and language (as discussed in our previous readings) are and do affect the conversations. Other than body language, voice, and language, other indications of our emotions include emojis, gifs, and stickers.
“The Chat Circle Series” offered an interesting insight on chat interfaces and their design. One feature of Chat Circles I found intriguing is behavioral representations of users on ChatScape using shapes. The particular feature that surprised me the most is the dependency of the user’s shape on the judgement of other participants. For instance, if a user is aggressive or obnoxious (visually, a shape with many edges and angles), would other users want to engage in conversation with them? It is possible that this alter the way users converse because they are more aware of what other participants think of them. The Chat Circles history interface was also cool because it’s very similar to message logs we have today (texts, iMessage, Facebook Messenger), but it displays the posts as horizontal bars. I liked how the history allowed for a visual representation of the frequency and time of posts.
Questions
- In what ways do current social media sites impose walls between people? (I understand the issues the authors pose in the Introduction about digital tools being primitive and cumbersome, but I’m not entirely sure how these impose walls)
- Does a user with more edges on their shape (for ChatScape) make them less approachable?
- Was it fruitful to include behavioral representations on ChatScape?
