Paper Reading #30: Life "modes" in social media

Life “Modes” in Social Media


Authors - Fatih Kursat Ozenc and Shelly D. Farnha


Authors Bios - Fatih Kursat Ozenc was a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon and is currently looking for a job.
Shelly D. Farnha is a researcher at Microsoft Research and has a PhD from the University of Washington


Venue - This paper was presented at the CHI '11 Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference on Human factors in computing systems.


Summary


Hypothesis - In this paper, researchers suggest that people interact differently in different social contexts (life facets) of their live such as work, school, and home environments. The researchers hypothesize that the same can be said of users on the internet and that by organizing and sharing information in different ways across various contexts, online interaction will be easier and more effective to use.


Methods - The researchers decide to use a design-research approach that will allow them to use their current understanding and validate and/or deepen their knowledge of the subject. The researchers performed two-hour interviews consisting of:

• A Life Mapping Activity - Participants are to draw out the important areas of their lives and then explain how they currently handle transitions between them online
• A Need Validation Session - A series of concept scenarios are presented to participants and they are asked to discuss what they think of the problem and the proposed solution
• A Visual Metaphors Ranking Activity - Users rank what they think is the most effective way to visualize the different contexts of their lives

Results - 16 participants chosen to contribute to the study. Results were as follows:

• Life Mapping Activity - Most participants chose to draw a social meme map or a timeline map to model their lives. Found to be very similar to mind maps. Most start with "me" and move outward with Family, Work, and Social categories. These categories were further divided into more specific areas like soccer team or immediate family. The timeline maps were either daily or life organized and looked for collage like than the social meme maps.
• Communication Practices - Participants are asked to go through their life maps and color code areas by the method of communication they use in each. The closer someone was to the person, the more likely a mix was used to communicate with them whereas people further away tended to only have one or two communication methods. People tended to manage the boundaries of their communication channels by being very specific with where the channel was directed.
• Segmenting Areas of Life - The researchers found that job type, personality type, and other factors help determine how segmented a user will keep their life. For instance, managers tend to keep family and work completely segmented. Also found that most people had 1 personal, 1 work, and 1 junk email account.
• Transitions - People tend to transition between facets, or modes, by physically moving through time or space. Online transitions proved to be subtle and effected mainly by the methods above (ex. changing to a personal laptop stops use of work email).
• Need Validation Session - The participants showed a much greater liking of focused sharing and consuming scenarios over organizing and transition scenarios.

Content - 3 main themes found were:

• Modes of the Self - The term mode was found to be preferable compared to facets and people indicated that the long term goal was to be consistent in all life modes although small changes are required.
• Focused Sharing - People greatly liked the idea of focused sharing and did not want to share information to too many people. A better way to do this would be asking what groups to share with rather than share with all friends or no friends.
• Mobile Me - An overarching theme of the entire study was that when the researchers discussed interaction as desktop-based, many users began explaining that their communication is now almost completely mobile-based.

Some design recommendations learned from this study are:

• Think holistically due to the richness of people's lives
• Prioritize focused sharing scenarios
• Organize sharing by people and life modes
• Prioritize mobile
• Provide tools for transitioning 

Conclusion - The researchers conclude by stating that they have found a need for focused sharing and consuming in the digital communication world and designers should think holistically when designing any kind of communication tool.


Discussion

I think the researchers did an excellent job of supporting their hypothesis and showed that people interact in ways that the internet does not completely support. I think this paper effectively shows why we need "mode" options in all social networking and that we don't necessarily need any new ways of communicating but rather ways of aggregating all of the current ways we communicate and the mobile world is definitely helping with that.