[Reader-list] Studying how user interface affects discussion and community online
Kiran Jonnalagadda
jace at pobox.com
Tue Jan 25 00:44:19 IST 2005
Hello, this is my first post here.
I'm studying how user interface affects discussion and the resulting
community in online spaces. In keeping with the spirit of the
investigation, I've posted the full text of the proposal to an online
discussion space, my journal:
http://www.livejournal.com/users/jace/351443.html
Ignore the comments, please. They make it sound like I won a medal. ;-)
My original idea for this investigation came from LiveJournal itself,
where I've been a regular user for several years and noticed usage
patterns related to the user interface. An example:
LiveJournal supports threaded discussions -- that is, a discussion
where you can reply to anybody, the person who made the post or someone
who made a comment on the post -- a feature unremarkable in mailing
lists because it's taken for granted, but unusual for a blog, where the
norm is that readers can comment only on the original post, not on
another comment. LiveJournal goes one step further: when you reply to
someone, they get an email notification with a copy of your comment,
and links leading back to the comment online or to the entire post.
Combine threaded discussions with email notifications, and you have the
ability to let your readers talk to each other without involving you.
Here is a recent example from my journal:
http://www.livejournal.com/users/jace/360412.html
Notice that my post of a picture of a clothesline has spawned an
unrelated discussion on henna. From personal knowledge, two of the
three people involved were not previously familiar with each other.
Thanks to LiveJournal's user interface, my post provided a space for
these two to get familiar with each other, from where they will go on
to engage in each other's journals, essentially building a community
where most people know each other well enough to be comfortable in
their company.
Some people will argue that threaded discussions are bad precisely
because they allow people to fork off into parallel discussions, taking
attention away from the original post. While this may be a problem on
Usenet or mailing lists, it's not on LiveJournal because posts have a
limited lifetime. This used to be a few days earlier, but it's barely
24 hours these days (a sign of LJ's UI design approaching overload). I
will attempt to explain this in my next post to this list.
In around August/September last, when I first presented the idea for
this investigation to the good folks at Sarai, but didn't know exactly
what I wanted to do, Joel Spolsky of JoelOnSoftware.com wrote an
article on social interfaces in software:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/NotJustUsability.html
His article helped considerably with clarifying the purpose of my
investigation, and explains it better than I have here.
I've had a busy January honouring earlier commitments (and hence the
delay of this post). During February, I will document UI related
observations from various communities online. Since these observations
have no backing other than my own claims, between March and July I will
attempt to experimentally verify them with a willing community.
I'm looking for such a community. It will be a difficult search since
they must be capable of modifying their software -- and I don't have
the resources to build an experimental community just for this
investigation -- but I hope I find one. Please let me know if you are
interested.
Have a good week, everyone.
--
Kiran Jonnalagadda
http://www.pobox.com/~jace
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