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Stephanie Slobodian

Social Circle Influence: Highlights From UX Week 2011

September 8th, 2011

Social Media, UX Design

At the end of August, hundreds of User Experience professionals gathered on the beautiful UC San Francisco campus for UX Week 2011. Days of collaborative workshops left new friends spinning with ideas, and more than one innovative startup laid its roots within the Mission Bay Conference Center.

The initial and final days of the conference allowed participants to sit back and listen to industry leaders. Topics ranged from a United Nations project that utilizes real-time technologies to identify vulnerable populations in crises, to the show-stopping presentation by Darren David of Stimulant, explaining Kinect hacking and building-size projection mapping.

But without a doubt, the highlight for me was Paul Adams of Facebook. Adams spoke about social design and how our customers’ social circles influence what they do, where they go, and what they buy. He challenged us as designers to “think of social design like electricity – it should be the hub of what we design”.

Adams believes the web is still in its infancy, and that a correction to reorient the web around people is underway.  He stressed how important it is for us to understand what motivates people, saying, “If you don’t build sites around people, someone else will”. Adams explained how people live in networks built on relationships such as location, hobbies, school, and family, and that within these networks individuals have strong ties, weak ties and temporary ties. Strong ties are made up of those that we are closest to, generally a small group of about four or five. Weak ties are friends or extended family with whom there is less than daily contact. Temporary ties are acquaintances that are made casually and contact is sporadic.  The diagrams below illustrate the average person’s networks and how “ties” radiate outward.

Networks are connected by the individual. Adams disagrees with the earlier research that states that in order to be an influencer, a person needs to have expertise in a certain subject and have amassed an audience receptive to being influenced.  Instead, he believes that everyone is an influencer and the people who connect networks are not special, but it is the networks that we live in that determine how people influence each other. Adams’ idea is that our strong ties are the ones that influence us the most. An influencer from our network may make us aware of a product but it is the strong ties that we trust that help us decide what to buy, where to go, and what to do.

According to Adams, we are less influenced by people that we don’t know and networks that we are not part of.  Considering this, endorsements made mostly by our strong ties – and sometimes weak and temporary ties –  may be more influential than celebrity endorsements. As social media matures and becomes central to products and service offerings, it will be interesting to observe if the power in fact lies within in our own private networks.    View Paul’s full presentation