Lately I have been thinking a lot about identity online and how things like age and gender affect how you approach projecting an online identity. Working with a startup that is creating opportunities for kids to be digital citizens with ownershop and accountability for their online identities made me wonder about what should be encouraged and what tools we need to be creating, implementing, educating people about when it comes to managing who they are and how they will be seen online. Can teaching kids early on how to behave and what consequences can be for bad behavior, alleviate some of the issues we see with older folks, particularly women?

Many women create separate profiles for various factors of their online life; personal—sharing photos and information with friends about life, kids, family and other non-business related things; professional—building resume, professional connections, participating in professional discussion groups; spiritual—sharing aspects of spiritual beliefs with others who are like minded. There are others, of course like profiles specific to gaming or politics and other specific interests.

These facets of a person can be seen quite distinctly with women who are overtly concerned with the effects their personal and spiritual life can have on their professional acceptance and credibility. These facets are also important for women who want to participate online but who have concerns or have had experience with stalkers (in real life or online) or obsessive exes.

I attended the She’s Geeky unconference recently and was involved in a lengthy conversation about these topics. Anecdotally, the experiences of the participants fell along this model for how they presented themselves online.

Concern arises with companies like Facebook making changes to their privacy policy and privacy behaviors. The carefully crafted separations are suddenly merged and people are outed in ways they hadn’t expected or approved. This is not acceptable and we shouldn’t shrug it off as if it is.

Another interesting point to consider is that many of the web sites that promote sharing identity and information are built by men, who are often younger and single or only recently married without children. The concerns that women have about their family safety or their own safety through exposed information on the internet, never even occurs to these men as an issue.

When thinking about how to address these concerns through software offerings, some options come to mind:

• Rather than one size fits all, allow users to create facets of themselves.
• More clearly indicate how cross linking and sharing across services exposes information.
• Privacy controls add complexity which can deter adoption, so a combination of efforts is needed. Clear education about how to use privacy controls and what the consequences of various actions might be can be lightly integrated as Did You Know type informative blocks of info on sites. Facebook did alert users that the privacy controls were going to change, but they were rather vague on what the consequences of doing nothing might be.

I think it is important for the larger social networks to understand that not everyone wants all the information about everything they do aggregated together. I use Linked In for one reason, flickr for another, twitter for another and Facebook for a very different reason. My network is different on each although there are overlaps. I want these places separate because frankly, no one in my professional network really cares what concert I just saw or what photos I have posted of my dog. (Of course I say that here, but in reality because of the overlaps in my network across these services, stuff bleeds across and I am not sure how to stop it).

Generational Differences

An interesting point to think about in terms of Identity and Privacy and how someone is presented on the internet are the generational differences that we sometimes see, in addition to the gender differences. Younger women are not as inclined to create facets of themselves as older women. I am not sure what the cutoff is and if regionality plays a role. Additionally, I would be inclined to bet that as these younger women marry and have children, they will start to segment parts of themselves. I think it would be interesting to see if location plays a role as well.

Identity Segregation

The two large areas where I think people still make anonymous profiles or pseudonymous profiles, are around spirituality or religion and politics. Of course, I have no data about this but it would be worth exploring further. There are most likely large groups of women who totally segregate their online activity in these spaces from their professional or even personal generic online activity. These topics can be highly polarizing and despite anti-discrimination laws, people still let their own beliefs and attitudes affect how they relate to others. Subtle and subconscious changes in behavior can happen even when trying hard not to let it.

As more and more companies develop robust social experiences in their products and people spend more of their free time online, the need to have layers of privacy controls becomes even more important.

Issues in Being Open

The other aspect to this identity dilemma lies in the connectedness of information and data across services. As a designer in this space and fully bought into the Open philosophy, I believe that data wants to be free. Data should be owned by its creator (the individual) and should be able to be taken across services easily. The ease with which this can be done, without granular controls – which can hinder adoption and usability – can directly impact the blurring of segregated identity. Therein lies the dilemma. It can’t be solved by one company but should be considered as part of these open initiatives.

There is a certain amount of responsibility that lies on each individual to make sure any segmentation of themselves stays segmented even if it means, for now, keeping up with all the changes that some of these companies insist on making. It also may mean, not using the services of other companies until they add in layers of acceptable control.

I have been super busy lately with client work, presentations and conferences and prepping for an upcoming portfolio review related to my photography work. I have a couple of deep posts about Identity and Using the Social Mania Cards in your work in progress and will get those finished soon but in the meantime, if there is anyone left out there following me, consider coming to one of my upcoming talks or workshops.

IA Summit 2010

Date: April 7, 2010
Event website: http://2010.iasummit.org/
Details: Pre-conference workshop:
Beyond Findability: Re-framing IA practice and strategy for turbulent times — IAI Workshop
Also: Play the Social Mania game at Game Night!
Phoenix, Arizona

German IA Konferenz

Date: May 13 – 15, 2010
Event website: http://www.iakonferenz.org/de/2010/english.html
1/2 Day Workshop: Designing Social Interfaces
Keynote presentation May 14
Cologne, Germany

Web Visions 2010

Date: May 19–21, 2010
Event website: http://www.webvisionsevent.com/
Details:
Full Day Workshop: Designing Social Interfaces
Wednesday, May 19th, from 9:00 am to 12:00 pm

Presentation: Go With the Flow
Thursday, May 20th, from 10:45 to 11:45 am
Portland, Oregon

UIE Web App Masters Tour: June

Date: June 7–8, 2010
Event website: http://www.uie.com/events/web_app_masters/philadelphia/
Details: Designing The Social In
Philadelphia, PA

An Event Apart 2010: Minneapolis

Date: July 26–27, 2010
Event website: http://aneventapart.com/2010/minneapolis/
Details: Patterns, Components and Code, Oh My!
Minneapolis, Minnesota

An article companion to part of the talk I have been giving is finally up at Boxes and Arrows. The topic – 5 steps to building social experiences – covers the 5 practices section of the talk. Taken together with the article Christian wrote for ASIST, on the 5 principles and 5 anti-patterns, you have the foundation to get started, smartly, in building social experiences.

In writing our book, Designing Social Interfaces, we challenged ourselves to creating a social pattern language, much like Christopher Alexander created a pattern language for building and architecture. We have followed the evolution of design patterns but looking back into A Pattern Language, there are some concepts that Alexander talks about that are directly applicable for consideration when designing social spaces.

Architecture is about creating spaces for people. The type of space and how it is created, placed and modeled can directly affect the kind of behavior that might take place in that space. In other words, the space can modify behavior or encourage and support behaviors. Online social spaces should work the same way.

In that light, there are a few of Alexander’s patterns that are worth exploring in relation to online social design.

Early on in A Pattern Language, there are a few patterns that talk about the city, neighborhoods and the cultures that exist and overlap in a city or town. Alexander talks about the division and subdivision of spaces to support and provide havens for these different subcultures.

The Mosaic of Subcultures
Pattern #8 which calls for a Mosaic of Subcultures

“The homogeneous and undifferentiated character of modern cities kill all variety of lifestyles and arrests the growth of individual character”

Therefore:

“Do everything possible to enrich the cultures and subcultures of the city, by breaking the city as far as possible, into a vast mosaic of small and different subcultures, each with its own spatial territory, and each with the power to create its own distinct life style. Make sure that the subcultures are small enough so that each person has access to the full variety of life styles in the subcultures near his own.”

The pattern talks about the division of space to make distinctive areas for these subcultures. The web is a good example of this mosaic. Each site in “cyberspace” is a spatial territory with a unique perspective, offerings and in the case of social experiences it’s own life style and community.

In the creation of a social experience, the builders can take this a step further and provide spaces for each subculture within the context of the parent to create a richer, more varied experience. It’s not much fun if we are all always the same.

Community of 7000
In pattern #12  – Community of 7000 – Alexander states that

“Individuals have no effective voice in any community of more than 5000-10000 persons.”

He cites Athenian democracy, both Jeffersonian’s plans for American democracy and Confucius’s book on government, in support of this. His perspective is based on the size of the community and the individual’s effect on government or lack thereof when a community gets too large. While the focus is on government, I think there are lessons to consider here when thinking about the online social experience.

When there are too many people in a community, especially one that is vocal and active, people will get lost. There is too much noise and not enough good content gets to the right people. Once a community crosses over that critical mass sweet spot, you need to either add tools to allow users to help surface the good stuff, find their friends and create their own sub-groups or you need to calve off areas into sub-sections or sub-groups that may be more formal.

Therefore:

“Decentralize city governments in a way that gives local control to communities of 5000 to 10000 persons. As nearly as possible, use natural geographic and historical boundaries to mark these communities. Give each community the power to initiate, decide and execute the affairs that concern it closely…”

Giving your users the ability to create their own groups as needed helps keep them engaged and part of the community since they are actively creating their own version within the space you have provided.

For example, Flickr allows people to create groups around any topic – location, type of image, type of camera, whatever. As groups get so big that you can’t keep up with the number of images flowing by or conversations being had, the tools allow the group creator to gate the number of images posted or to limit the number of users or to create other rules that filter and help surface the contributions by the community back to the community. Additionally, at any time someone can come along and create a new variation on the group or create a private group which keeps the numbers manageable.

In our book, we have a principle that we discuss called Deliberately Leave things Incomplete. This principle reminds site designers that while they can design a framework for interaction, they cannot predict and shouldn’t predict every interaction a social community will have. The designer needs to think at the meta level and allow the participants of the community to define and design their own engagements and interactions. In other words, they create their own lifestyle and execute their affairs that concern them, all we do as designers is give them the space in which to do it.

Alternatively, we can consider adding tools to squash the noise, allow the good to rise to the top and still keep the numbers of people involved large. Things like ratings and recommendations will both address this in different ways. Ratings can help push good up and bad down. The downside, though, of ratings is that lots of people always rate everything high or always rate everything low. So consideration of your context will be important before implementing ratings. Inevitably, ratings are much more meaningful when combined with reviews which then give them context.

Recommendations based on an algorithm and user or content reputation can help people find the needle in the haystack or discover something new that they weren’t necessarily looking for. This combination of features is much more complex to develop and takes longer to fully realize as there are several types of factors that need to be in play—enough content to mine, enough activity to infer quality content attributed to a specific person, mechanisms to indicate quality, like sharing, ratings among others and secret sauce to accurately predict options. This type of approach can be so hard and complex that sites like Netflix recently held a contest with a million dollar prize to the best and brightest computer scientists to create a better recommendation algorithm. On the other hand, this approach has the potential to provide really meaningful, contextually relevant, information to a person which in turn drives loyalty and activity.

Identifiable Neighborhoods
Pattern #14 In A Pattern Language calls for there to be an Identifiable Neighborhood in the town or city.

“People need an identifiable spatial unit to belong to.”

If the web is akin to the mosaic of subcultures in a city or town, then your site is a neighborhood and as such should be identifiable in a way that allows people to belong to it. People should be able to have an affinity – through interest, passion, background etc. to the offerings of your social service. The social object – the thing which draws people together and around which they interact, communicate, build relationships etc. – should be clearly articulated. It’s not about building social for social’s sake, but to create a “there” there.

Once you have a stake in the ground around your social object, you need to think about the kinds of activities that would revolve around that activity. What are people already doing? What kinds of activities naturally want to happen? Let the answers to these questions help define the features that you implement. Keep in mind too, that the social object and the kinds of activities that you support will help define the subculture that will emerge on your site. Different activities are going to draw different kinds of people depending on the level of participation required to be involved.

The decisions around the activities that are most appropriate will also help guide how and when to grow.
These are just a handful of the patterns in Alexander’s book that focus on architecture and how buildings come together to form cities and towns and spaces for humans. As we evolve the online experience, we can learn from some of these lessons and apply these same concepts to our social digital spaces keeping in mind that the design of the space can modify behavior.

There are several other patterns in Alexander’s work that I believe are directly applicable as well and will dive into those in a future post.

A couple of weeks ago I gave the 5 Principles, 5 Practices, 5 Anti-Patterns talk to the IxDA Los Angeles group. It was a great group of people and they asked me some really tough questions at the end of the talk. I thought some of them were so good, I have been thinking about them since and wanted to share more thoughts about the ideas.

1. We are now seeing lots of people online and using sites like Facebook. People are living out their experiences online and sharing all sorts of things  – pics, comments etc. What do you think about the fact that people are now realizing that all the things they share online can be found and seen by prospective employers, by spouses, by parents – sometimes long after the original events occured? How do we as designers, let people know that this can happen, that what goes up is hard to control once it is free on the internet, and how should we be thinking about giving people controls over their content?

I think this was the gist of the question. In general, as discussed by danah boyd in many of her talks and research papers, and discussed in our book, we are seeing this sense of Many Publics. We are also seeing the evolution of attitudes and behaviors and generational differences. What is shocking to our parents, our bosses etc.,  like finding the pictures of our coworkers or prospective employees partying like idiots when they were in college, is not as shocking to the younger generation. What we may have deemed youthful indulgence, when heard about in an anecdote, was not visible for all in the past, non-online life, but today these experiences will eventually have to be re-categorized and put into their appropriate place even if they can still be retrieved instantly with the flick of a mouse.

Everyone is stupid when they are young. We do dumb things. We used be able to leave those things in the past as we grew up. Our personal and our professional lives could be kept separate. Today this is much harder as more and more people are coralling their network across various contexts in the same spaces – like Facebook. I believe that the generations up and coming, who have lived their whole lives online, will have a better attitude about the blurring of these public, private, youthful, professional lines than those of us who spent part of our life living one way and now another.

As designers and creators of social spaces, we need to educate people about the visibility of their images and words. We need to remind people, in polite and gentle ways, that what goes up on the internet often takes on a life of its own and is often difficult to remove later. I know I can find postings to email lists from 10 years ago through google.

Additionally, we need to make sure the tools to manage contexts and circles of connections are available and understood by users. This doesn’t mean having everything always up front and center – the complexity would kill any usability – but the tools should be easily accessed, easy to use once found and learned and control over who sees what, when, should be always available to people.

2. How do you know which social patterns to bring together around a particular social object? Which will work best and why?

This is a really good question. We have almost 96 patterns and proto-patterns in the book and a design team shouldn’t and can’t use them all. I reminded the audience to think about their users and to think about what it is that people do around their social object traditionally. What I mean by this is, what behaviors are people already doing. For example, if travel is your topic,  think about how people research travel today. If it’s knitting, what do people already do on or offline. Who do they talk to, how do they find new yarns, new patterns, new ideas? What do they do with items they have made, how do they share successes and problems?

Most things that people are interested in have an offline life (unless all you are interested in is online games, designing online and other tech related things).  Remembering to look at the obvious and then look at the social patterns that support the most basic of these behaviors. This is what you should start with and then support those interfaces with related patterns. This can help constrain what is designed and built allowing you to start simple and grow as needed or as your customers demand.

3. Do you work with marketing when designing social interfaces and experiences?

A little unpacking of this question reveals that the person asking was really trying to understand how a site that sells something can utlize social features to not only create an interesting social experience but also market to it’s users in meaningful ways.

I would think back to question 2 and what behaviors people already have around the topic and support those. Additionally, I would consider the features that provide the most viral impact in the least annoying manner to get the word out about your product or your service. Christina Wodtke talks a lot about Viral Distribution in her talk from Web 2.0 (start at slide 95) and she reminds us that in order for things to go viral we need to make sure that the ability to share and distribute is FRICTIONLESS (it’s got to be easy, drop dead easy), it must be AT HAND (it has to be readily available and convenient, everywhere that makes sense),  it must be IMPACTFUL (meaning you need to get bang for the buck. If you are going to spend time and effort creating a viral tool, it needs to be worth it), it must be TARGETED (the tools need to be available to the right people at the right time), and must support OUTREACH (does it have a broader life beyond the simple share, can it be rebroadcast or aggregated for even more reach).

When thinking about social patterns to support and encourage social behavior, the needs of the business must always be considered. This balance can be tenuous and sometimes can sway too far one way or the other to the detriment of the business or to the detriment of the community. If it’s all about selling or marketing then eventually the community will falter and if it’s all community at the expense of the core product or business supporting the community then that doesn’t generally make good business sense.

People need to remember that for some sites, tools as simple as sharing from one reader to a prospective reader, may be all that’s needed.

There were more really good questions asked that I will recount here in a future post.