Last year I started working on a project based on the question of how people see different online communication tools as affording different levels of intimacy: how they feel confident disclosing private information to their peers in different manner over different particular tools.

My first take on this question was to present a poster at the Memphis Information Architecture Summit, where I asked poster viewers to participate by marking their opinions of how they use these tools and how they see them used by the people they know. My poster includes images and captions taken from these same tools to depict the whole range of self-disclosure we can see on them, and I did not judge their disclosure level, leaving that to the eye of the beholder. These images and captions should evoke the participants to reflect on their own behavior and that of their online contacts.

There were about 30 respondents - they were variable across categories - and I later started transcribing their dots for analysis and some patterns start to emerge:

I had previously sketched a map of how the results could be displayed, and this included some of my intuitive approach of what I might find. I later composed the following chart by averaging the participants’ dots and placing them next to my predictions.

In the final chart, each platform or tool has two horizontal bars that depict their range of disclosure level, from the most intimate type of disclosure they support next to the axis, to the most open/formal/public types of discourse on their outer edge. Each blue bar represents the range covered by the averaged red dots to the averaged green dots for each category. The yellow bars show what I had initially drawn that could be found.

Looking at the results

I had expected blogs and flickr to reach the highest levels of public discourse, as these are technically public (by large percent) and easily reached via search engines, sometimes even favored by them. I had also expected to find a wide range on these, as this is what I’ve observed over the years. The range covered by blogs and flickr was not as broad in the participants’ opinion as on my previous guess.

I had anticipated Facebook to show up as a system that is rather private in nature, as studies have shown a growing number of people who block their profiles to public access, and the vast majority of people with whom I interact with on it have closed profiles and tend to share lots of family moments, so I naturally expected it to be seen a lot more private than blogs, which also in large proportion are not password protected. However, my respondents marked Facebook on a mid-range of intimate disclosure.

Twitter shows a big difference as when I drew my chart I was mostly thinking of chatter between friends, but apparently my respondents were thinking of a much more public, professional-strategic use of this tool.

Email appeared as the most flexible tool in the eye of my respondents, and I should have probably anticipated this more carefully.

A big surprise for me was to see how flexible these participants found IM to be, as I am mostly used to using it for personal matters, and my guess on these results show that these participants are accustomed to using IM in professional settings as well.

Lessons learned

My method for allowing people to mark their impressions on the poster was very informal and confusing, this ranges from the way they are asked to think about the issue to the way in which they had to mark it down on the poster with two colored pencils, one green, one red.

Besides the tactical difficulties of imagining this and plotting it on the chart, there’s a lot of variation on how people perceive their discourse to be intimate/public, in order to get proper measures, this will have to be operationalized in a much more formal and straightforward way.

What comes next

I’ll now go on to build a proper survey to measure the usage more closely. It will include some demographic screening focused on usage experience, and some measures of self disclosure as a personality trait, as I expect people’s personality to have a strong influence on their levels of disclosure. Also, I will be asking about particular behaviors, not just reflection on how they judge their own disclosure.

… So I’m working on a Literature Review of Online Social Networks last night, and writing out the salient ideas of the key articles I’m collecting. I’m going through a piece by David Beer’s 2008 article from JCMC in response to Boyd and Ellisson’s more popular article on the previous number.

One of Beer’s most interesting point is how he stresses out that, at the extent to which the Web has permeated our lives in most parts of the world, it no longer make sense to establish a difference between online and offline friends as Boyd and Ellison do in their article, and - in my opinion - although they are right in explaining that the label ‘friends’ is used in  some online social networks to describe relationships that don’t always represent what we would otherwise consider a friendship, this distinction is not a problem given by the nature of the relationships, but merely of the system’s design and its labeling.
Beer also points out another interesting thought: that OSNs could eventually transform the nature of friendship via the new dynamics these afford, this notion goes in hand with McLuhan’s famous words “We shape our tools, and then our tools shape us.”, yet more specifically Garrett’s take on this in terms of user experience design “When McLuhan said “we”, and when he said “us”, he was talking about the entire human race. But not everybody’s a shaper, right? The shapers are the people in this room, the people in this field. We shape those tools and then, the experiences that those tools create shape humanity itself. Think about the responsibility that entails.” (Garrett, 2009) And this relates to how if we label those links “friends” we can eventually lead to redefine the concept of friendship.

I just thought these were some iteresting connections to share, I’m still chewing on these ideas…

Last week my former boss, the Information Retrieval guru Ricardo Baeza published an article about the growth of Facebook in Chile, which currently includes over 4 million users, roughly one fourth of the country’s population. There he raises the question of why some rather small and non-develiped countries have been so strong to adopt social websites like Facebook. I don’t have an answer, but my suspicions lead to tight social clusters whithin society, fewer migrations within people’s lifetimes, and longer-lasting friendships. Supporting this data, we saw this week on Fred’s class a NYT map of Facebook’s growth, where Chile is clearly invaded by Facebook within this last year.

Last night, in Gary Marchionini’s class, we were recapping on the previous class about Information Architecture, and he shared with us some of his ideas about the whole IA/UX debate. He had some interesting thoughts that seemed quite sensible to me, and I had not seen from other people. I’m sure his farther position, and history in professorship give him an advantaged view. Some of these thoughts, bluntly paraphrasing, and adding from my own ideas:

• No profession is a fixed box, the edges are always fuzzy. He mentioned fields which we can see as stable and traditional as chemistry, you have clear differences between physical and organical chemists, but in practice they do more things in common than one would like to think. He also pointed how even in business school, the people who syudy accounting do much more thinks than book keeping.
• The discussion itself is an important ingredient of what makes the profession interesting. The people who work in this field are attracted by the fact that it’s a cutting edge area that is always on the move.
• Once you get the job, you define what the role is in that particular situation, based on your knowledge, skills and context.

This was my 5th time attending the IA Summit, I’ve always loved this conference because of the vibrant community it gathers and how people are quite open and generally warm. This time, what I bring back is mostly some deep thoughts that question how I’ve been managing my web presence and my career in general. As I put on my previous post, I saw many people giving great presentations that included things I’d been thinking and even talking about for the last few years. This leaves me with a bittersweet feeling as on one hand it’s great to see how much of a visionary I’ve been and how my intuitive thoughts are later proven to be right on track. The sour part is that I’ve not been loud enough to capitalize on my thoughts, although I did put my ideas out there, I was not heard by the community and they have just reached similar conclusions after longer roads.
One of the highlights of the Summit was Whitney Hess’s presentation on how to put your name out there. She did a wonderful job. I had heard her name a couple of times before, I met her last year in the Miami Summit and later made an important impact with her article on the 10 Most Common Misconceptions About User Experience Design. On her 1st IA Summit presentation, she made some great recommendations, some of which I’ve started to apply immediately.

• Ditch any excuses not to blog
• Find a short sentence to describe what makes you special. I’ve defined mine as: “I find patterns where others can’t”.

At the same time, her presentation Evangelizing Yourself also made me realize that I’m not the only one in a similar position: there are several great people that have been members of the IA community for a long time and have some great ideas, yet are quiet and fly under the radar. Whitney’s presentation was a big encouragement for us to come out of our shells.
My poster presentation went very well, there were always people around me and they did not give me a chance to look at the other posters. I got enough people to participate in the mapping survey that some patterns started to emerge. There was a lot of confusion on how to draw the map, but I think that the results I got, plus the comments people gave me, were strong enough feedback to see that the topic is interesting to many people, and it even has some uses that I had not envisioned, so it seems like I’ll be working on this the next Fall term. Big thanks to everyone who marked their dots, I’ll be putting my results here soon!

I’ve enjoyed this first day of IA Summit a lot, at the same time I’ve also felt lots of regret: I’ve seen many smart people give excellent presentations and I see an underlying theme that is pretty much the same idea I’ve been chewing up for years but have never given enough time to sit on top of until I get a book out of it. It’s basically the same thing I presented in my poster at Austin IA Summit in 2004, and later in a presentation in Vancouver 2006.
Here’s my basic premise: The Web is fundamentally a communication device, and we’ve lost lots of time by focusing the approach on Web design on Technology, Business and other fields but not making good use of Communication methods that the advertising industry has been using for years. Things like, developing, based on your research, a “Central Communication Concept”, that will guide your whole design strategy and set the tone of your content, is something I spoke about in my 2004 poster, and today I saw it mentioned in different terms from both Eric Reiss and Cindy Chastain, it’s great to see fantastic people promoting similar ideas, but at the same time makes me wonder what kinds of stuff I’ve missed by not having pushed my work on this further, some years ago. I have several other ideas to complete the notion that all of this boils down to communication, and how there are several tools from the field of communication that we can gain lots from, in terms of business power struggles and how to gain respect within the organization, there are some things that Joe Dyer also discussed today. Even our keynote speaker, Mike Wesch, put on bold letters how this is all about communication: I’ve been saying this for quite a few years. At the same time, this gives me lots of hopes by the kinds of ideas I’ll be able to come up with while working forward on my PhD program at UNC.

At the poster sessions, my work caught a lot of interest, so it seems like I’ll de working on the whole survey next semester.

True to the name of this blog and at the risk of pushing followers away, I’ll once more derail from my ‘on-topic’ commentary to talk about the current news in my country, which is sometimes moving to watch from afar.

One of this week’s prominent stories relates to an accident of a two year old girl who fell into the swimming pool during summer vacation. Ema Velasco is the second daughter of Andres Velasco, Chile’s ‘Secretary of Treasury’ (paraphrasing so you get the idea) and Consuelo Saavedra, a prominent journalist who’s been anchor for one of the main news programs for many years. Both their parents are quite appreciated by the public. Velasco has been quite strong at steering the country through the international crisis, and was forceful to protect the budget when a few years ago, when Chile had an unseen asset growth due to skyrocketing copper prices; and while people clamored him to augment spending, he wisely put it all into savings for bad times to come. Consuelo is one of those - scarce these days - very professional journalists who prepares her interviews well and is never shy asking tough questions.

Ema herself is in most of our memories as we could all watch Consuelo’s belly growing during her gestation on the nightly news. It was also a moment to remember when during an official government report to the nation, Andres paused momentarily from his usual stark professionalism to comment on how happy he was because that day his daughter had been born. They also gave an unusual intimate interview for a magazine when she was a few months old.

So the story now is that this girl fell into the swimming pool during the family vacation in the coast - it’s the peak of summer in the southern hemisphere - and her mother asked the nanny to check on the girl. Fortunately, the nanny had some first aid training - quite unusual - and was quick to react, helping the girl drop some water and breathe again Correction: the nanny was just quick to yell and it was the mother who performed the first aid. She was rushed to the hospital via helicopter, and after some days of intensive care, the girl opened her eyes yesterday and is aparenty reacting to music they are playing for her. I just wish she’ll be able to recover soon with as few damage as possible, those kids are most definitely meant to be very smart. My thoughts are with this family, who by the way, is not related to mine as far as I can tell. -  Save for the fact that if you search my name on Amazon you’ll find Andres’ publications, but that really doesn’t count.

This week I’m starting to teach a segment for a class, this year they’ve asked me to review the article that kick starts the conversation. The topic of this segment is Usability and Web 2.0, and I recently finished writing up that article. If you can read Spanish and want to see it let me know, I believe I’ll be publishing it soon, but for now I’ll summarize some of my ideas here.

If you’ve followed this blog long enough (thanks for your perseverance), you probably already know that the term “Web 2.0″ is a hard bone to chew for me, I think it’s at least artificial. I do agree that there’s an important trend going on here, and in that sense, Web 2.0 has already caught up and it’s functional in describing a certain era.

However, if we look more carfully at the history of the Web it’s not hard to see that it’s all been building up from the beginning, and one of the claims in my article is that we should call this Web 1.0, or Web Now We’re Talking. By this I mean that the current stage of things is closer to the way things were always meant to be, and all previous Web projects were the web’s adolescence. The current web is showing a state of maturity where it has evolved its own languages, its own design standards and is finding its interaction standards. The Web has now ceased to be a permutation of previous forms of media to find its own dynamics, and its own role in society. These days, the Web is even becoming a strong influence for traditional media, and the public is feeding topics into them.

If we take a look at how Cyberspace was first imagined, and even how the people who created the first computer networks were thinking, it gives us the impression that we are finally getting there and the early days of the Web were just experiments of youth.

“… When minds interact, new ideas emerge. We want to talk about the creative aspect of communication. Creative, interactive communication requires a plastic or moldable medium that can be modeled, a dynamic medium in which premises will flow into consequences, and above all a common medium that can be contributed to an experimented by all” (Licklider and Taylor, 1968 - The Computer as a Communication Device).

Regarding the original request of linking Web 2.0 and Usability, my position is that none of this massive participation would have been possible without the growing relevance of Usability within the Web development community, and how it has been embraced by business as a key factor of success. They just learned this by looking at the success stories of the early adopters of usability.

I know that most of the popular Web 2.0 projects skipped the traditional methods of usability to rely on “genius design” and a period of live public testing that allowed them to get valuable feedback that helped them fix some problems. However, this would have not been possible when usability was not something on most everyone’s mind and that all designers and developers know it’s important. My last note in this regard is “kids don’t try this at home” it’s always better to use proper usability methods, and include them as early as possible in the project.