Paer 1: Social Translucence: An Approach to Designing Systems that Support Social Processes
Paper 2: The Chat Circles Series: Explorations in designing abstract graphical communication interfaces
In the first paper, authors introduce a design theory called “social translucence” and describe it’s three characteristics: visibility, awareness and accountability. They embody these principles in a system called “Babble”. In the second paper, authors design series of graphical chat programs, starting from a simple interface to ones with advanced features and study implications of these features on social communication.
Although it’s been two decades since the Ist paper got published, the principles are still considered the core elements of the design of online social systems.
Making User’s identity and activity Visible through social signals: Users expose their identities using display picture and profiles while activity is visible using the feed, posts shared, likes and comments. The question is how much information is too much? Not all features will increase user engagement. I remember facebook removed its “ticker” feature that used to summarize the activities of our friends on right side of the news feed.
Visibility is again associated with design constraints (word limit of a tweet, ephemerality of snapchat video) as well as privacy concerns. Algorithmic bias might also affect visibility of activities of certain friends.
In the study done in 1st paper, authors considered small number of people where almost everyone is visible to everyone. That doesn’t hold true today. It’s impossible to have millions of people together in a single interface. Thus, today we have the concept of friend circle, followers, friend network etc.
So then comes the question, are people outside our network important? Do we want social cues from these people? Will I be as interested in seeing a post of “friend of a friend” as I will be of my immediate connection? And more importantly do we have a true estimate of our invisible audience? An interesting study was done in paper “Quantifying the Invisible Audience in Social Networks”. The authors found that “social media users consistently underestimate their audience size for their posts, guessing that their audience is just 27% of its true size”.
Does the above finding still holds true? Today although the online platforms are providing privacy settings to control every aspect of your data. But are users fully aware of these settings? Are they using these settings to their full potential? Can we do a study where people are shown the actual audience of their post, and study the after effects of such disclosure.
Authors describe the other two features in the best way. Awareness: “what do I know?”. Accountability: “I know that you know that I know”. Visibility gives rise to awareness. Blue double ticks on my whatsapp indicate that my friend has read the message. Awareness also brings social rules into picture. We are aware that trolling someone is bad. If I troll and abuse, I will be held accountable for my actions: I can be banned, my post could be removed, my answer could be downvoted. So awareness leads to accountability.
The papers introduce two systems: babble and chat series. Both study the effect of several graphical features on communication. Today, communication is no longer limited to text, we have images, videos, GIFs, emojis. Technological and infrastructure barriers in using realist (video calls) and mimetic(3D) means of displaying information no longer exist. Some of the findings in Chat circle paper still hold today, some not. Like in chat circle 2, a background image is added to give chatspace a theme. Today, the chat spaces are not bounded by themes and almost everything is discussed everywhere. But display pictures can have themes, like a rainbow effect on your dp in Facebook shows that you support gay rights. Having friends in circles failed for google plus. Chatscapes feature to follow or avoid someone very much exists today. In chatscape one can modify other’s appearances by labelling them as “funny” etc. Similar to this, we have reactions (anger, laugh, like) but these are given to posts and not people.
