Links and quotes on social ux design compiled by @david_z
The Twitter User Research team is looking for Twitter users to participate in an upcoming research study.
Details of the study:
* The study will take place in January via phone and web screen sharing
* The duration of the study session is about 1 hour
* You’ll receive a $100 Amazon.com gift card as a token of our appreciation
— Twitter’s User Research Team Launches Survey And Pays $100 For Your Participation
Twitter, Facebook and Reddit have done an excellent job at making news that is responsive … What makes social media networks so efficient at publishing news? 1. Whoever publishes news in social media channels does so not only expecting a response, he also acknowledges a certain personal responsiveness as a publisher. Being ready to discuss what you say is the media appropriate mindset for whoever publishes in a two way medium. 2. Social media users do not only find news through their network, they also comment, save, and redistribute the information they read. In essence, 99% of all news sites still follow the authoritarian I-say-you-hear model.
— Oliver Reichenstein: “News design is not just how news looks, it is how news works”
At Twitter, we found that if you visited Twitter at least 7 times in a month, then it was likely you were going to be visiting Twitter in the next month, and the next month, and the next month. And we decided this was enough initially to be “really using it”, though of course I think Twitter gets even better when people use Twitter every day or more.
Twitter seems to be the only newsfeed-driven network where users can easily & constantly retune their graph.
— @semil
If you launch with a small, dedicated group of interesting people that can asymmetrically follow each other, along with a global feed of all content posted, you can feel like you are the member of an interesting and vibrant community. […] Pinterest and Instagram followed the Twitter blueprint of asymmetric follows + global feed to scale from a small critical mass of interesting people into a massive, global community. […] Anti-network effects occur when a community which has already achieved critical mass begins to lose value with each additional signup. The reason is that the core community that created the value to begin with starts to get marginalized and leaves.
On August 23, 2007, the Twitter hashtag was born.
Mobile engineering and Design had about nine weeks to design, prototype, develop, test, and calibrate mobile.twitter.com for launch.
Twitter didn’t add official support to @replies as part of the platform until May 2008, fully 2 years after twitter launched and a year and a half after the idea of @replies was proposed.
Teens embracing new services say they’d rather use aliases than their real names. […] On Twitter or Tumblr, they say, they can also be more selective about what they share and with whom, and feel less social pressure to “friend” everyone in their school or friends of friends. Twitter, they say, just feels more private and intimate. They can use pseudonyms or private locked accounts so their tweets stay between friends. […] “Teens need a place to socialize and express themselves without grown-ups staring at them.”
One of the many ways that users shaped the evolution of Twitter was by inventing a way to reply to a specific person or a specific message. So, this syntax, the “@username” was completely invented by users, and we didn’t build it into the system until it already became popular and then we made it easier. This is one of the many ways that users have shaped the system.
[…]
A few months ago when there was a gas shortage in Atlanta. Some users figured out that they would Twitter when they found gas — where it was, and how much it cost — and then appended the keyword “#atlgas” so that other people search for that and find gas themselves.
we frequently test hundreds of variations of new features and designs with small groups of users. We test everything from subtle tweaks in the language of our sign-up pages and removing the search box from our homepage to big shifts in navigation elements.
if you want to build a product and you want to build a product that is relevant to folks, you need to put yourself in their shoes and you need to write a story from their side. So, we spend a lot of time writing what’s called user narratives of this user or this person. He is in the middle of Chicago and they go to a coffee store in the middle of Chicago. This is the experience they’re going to have. It reads like a play. It’s really, really beautiful. If you do that story well, then all of the prioritization, all of the product, all of the design and all the coordination that you need to do with these products just falls out naturally because you can edit the story and everyone can relate to the story from all levels of the organization, engineers to operations to support to designers to the business side of the house. So, that story is very, very important for us.
Twitter is basically just you having a conversation with yourself hoping that someone else will join in.
September 28, 2010:
To anyone curious about #NewTwitter proportions, know that we didn’t leave those ratios to chance.
Twitter users represent two different types of “content camps”
[…]
The analysis resulted in two clusters, which we labeled “Informers” (20% of users) and – to suggest a new term – “Meformers” (80%) […] while Meformers typically post messages relating to themselves or their thoughts, Informers post messages that are informational in nature.
[…]
Note that although the Meformers’ self focus might be characterized by some as self-indulgent, these messages may play an important role in helping users maintain relationships with strong and weak ties. Our findings suggest that the users in the “information sharing” group tend to be more conversational, posting mentions and replies to other users, and are more embedded in social interaction on Twitter, having more social contacts.
— Is it Really About Me? Message Content in Social Awareness Streams [pdf]
