The continuous evolution of computer systems and networks infrastructures connected the world, making it possible for anyone connected to the internet to easily communicate and interact with acquaintances as well as strangers within various contexts. With new possibilities, new challenges arise. A question imposes itself, how to maximally convey the traits of real-life social interactions through a computer application?
Electronic online communications date back to early 1970s when the email service was introduced. No doubt that this was revolutionary, however, with the evolution of computer systems and applications, it became possible to create other contexts of online communication with a more synchronous aspect, where people could have an online conversation as similar as possible to a real-life one. This possibility raises the above question.
In an attempt to address this question, Thomas Ericsson, and Wendy A. Kellogg introduced the concept of Social Translucence to the design of social applications. In their work “Social Translucence: An Approach to Designing Systems that Support Social Processes”, they first define social translucence in terms of three aspects of real-life social interactions; visibility, awareness, and accountability. After that, they present the design of an online social application that serves as a knowledge community. Although their design looks simple, its details attempt to capture many aspects of social interactions. Their application is called Babble, and it consists of multiple textual conversation threads where people chat with each other about some topics. They also design a graphical representation of the conversation called social proxy, which depicts a conversation as a circle, and people are small circles moving within the large circle to reflect their activity within the conversation.
From my view, one of the most successful parts of their design is the way the conversation is organized. The date and time stamps, followed by the name and the text message convey a lot of information from a social perspective. This reflects the flow of the conversation, how fast people respond to each other, and it gives the sense of a lively conversation because everyone is seeing what all other parties of a conversation are saying in a near real-time way. It also makes it possible for people who later join a conversation to catch up with at least the most recent part of it. We can notice that this is the convention for most of today’s chatting tools.
The design of the social proxy adds more awareness to some characteristics of the conversation. From my view, this idea is successful in terms of reflecting the activity of speakers and listeners within a conversation, however, there could be different meanings and interpretations associated with the spatial patterns of users. This point of spatial patterns is from the points I like the most about the Chat Circles Series project.
The Chat Circles Series is an attempt to add more liveness and awareness to online conversations by introducing concepts of hearing range and moving in the space. The original Chat Circles and its evolutions try to move as close as possible to a real-life style of conversations. Although this is good in terms of portraying many aspects of social interactions, it could have some drawbacks.
If I imagine traveling back in time and talking with the designers to improve their design. I would focus on how online conversations will become an inherent and mixed part of every day’s life, and in order to cope with the pace of the users’ lifestyle, their design will need to become much simpler. Although some parts of the Chat Circles’ designs are used in today’s chatting tools, for example, the circles growing and shrinking to indicate who is speaking in a group call in Skype, I would stand for the simplicity and readability of Ericsson et al.’s design of a chat thread. Their design is highly used in current chatting tools. Combined with some newer features such as “last active” or “seen by”, and the possibility of reacting with an emotion icon (e.g. emojis) is able to convey sufficient social information.
Finally, my ultimate belief is that although it is highly useful and important to import as much real-life social traits as we could to the digital life, it will never replace the value and importance of a real-life social conversation.
