Designing social computing systems / social media systems is difficult. This is at least partially because our existing design strategies don’t work very well for the extremely-social systems like Facebook or delicious.com. The basic problem comes from trying to straightforwardly apply user-centered design. You certainly can put a user in a lab and watch them use these social systems. But that won’t actually help you understand their design much. At best, it can suggest a few minor tweaks. But the problem is that users don’t use these systems by themselves; they use these systems are part of a (sometimes rather large) group. And many (most) of the actions of a user are reactions to things other users have said or done. Basically, what this means is that when designing these social systems, you can’t look at users in isolation. Treating users as if they were independent doesn’t work.
But it is actually more complicated than that. These systems frequently don’t work unless users behave in specific ways. Delicious doesn’t work as a social system unless people bookmark pages of interest. Digg depends on users voting on stories in a consistent and coherent way. Wikipedia depends on logical contributions and collaboration across editors. Designing technologies like this is more than just making it easy to do this required behavior; it is important for the rest of the system that users behave correctly.
Incentive-centered design is a different way of thinking about designing these systems that is being developed at the University of Michigan. First, the designer figures out what behaviors are necessary and important for the system to function properly. And then second, the designer designs a technology that induces (or encourages) the appropriate behaviors from its users. It is different from user-centered design because it focuses primarily on behavior, and how the technology influences how users choose to behave. It also focuses on positively influencing behavior: it tries to encourage good behaviors rather than trying to eliminate difficulties and problems.
It is important to remember that both parts of the design philosophy are important. It is not always easy to know what behaviors are appropriate. Tools like game theory are vital to understanding how users react to each other, and how users’ actions aggregate to form system-level properties. And once the designer understand how he or she wants users to behave, getting users to behave in that way is difficult. Technology can only do so much in influencing how users treat the system, and we don’t have much research into appropriate designs for encouraging specific behaviors.
Separating the design process into these two steps also provides guidance for my research agenda. Both steps in the process need research support.
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