How To Design Social Media Interfaces For The Irrational Human Mind

Jay Vidyarthi works as a user experience designer and research coordinator at Yu Centrik and will be talking in-depth about cognitive bias and user experience at the UX Masterclass on September 20th in Montreal. Like any interactive system, social media depends largely on effective human-computer interfaces. In my day-to-day work as a user experience designer, I often use principles in psychology to help design interfaces which are easy to use and persuasive. I thought it might benefit the Social Times community to provide a clear example of how a strict psychological approach can provide new perspectives to the social media landscape. We'll start with a summary of how psychology contributes to marketing and design, and we'll move toward applying social psychology to a clearer understanding of how social media works (and how to make social media work). This may seem like a long article, but in order to make sure people from any background can understand, I wanted to start with the basics. UNDERSTANDING THE IRRATIONAL HUMAN MIND When observing the world, making decisions and performing actions, people are rarely perfectly rational. Psychologists have shown that a wide range of factors can influence us our view of the world. As it turns out, we are much more complex than strict, logical robots. For example, let's imagine you're heading to the mall because you need to buy a new mobile phone. If you went to one store which offered two phones, you would make a judgement on the differences and similarities between them. Interestingly, if you saw the exact same phones at different times (you didn't have the opportunity to evaluate them simultaneously), you would actually tend to see more similarity between the two options. Obviously, this doesn't make logical sense, the phones haven't changed, so why should our perception of them change? As it turns out, psychologists have demonstrated that humans make this mistake consistently (known as "distinction bias"). A wide range of such "cognitive biases" have been shown to affect how we see the world. Whether deliberately or not, marketers and designers take advantage of these cogitive biases every day. Those responsible for client-facing elements, from websites to store layouts to advertising campaigns, benefit from an understanding of how the human mind sees the world and, ultimately, makes decisions. A UNIQUELY SOCIAL EXAMPLE Since our focus is on new social media perspectives, I would like to focus on a bias which uniquely applies to the way we process our social world: the "Actor-Observer Bias". As typical with psychological concepts, it seems complicated, but it's quite simple. Actor-Observer Bias: "Actors tend to attribute the causes of their behavior to stimuli inherent in the situation, while observers tend to attribute behavior to stable dispositions of the actor." -Jones & Nisbett, 1971 In a situation where one person observes another acting, there is a difference in how both people explain the cause of the action or behaviour. The actor will suggest that his action was related to the situation and context surrounding it, while the observer will suggest it was a result of traits and dispositions of the actor himself. In other words, I would more likely attribute my actions to my environment and context, while you would likely judge them as coming from my personality and internal disposition. ACTORS AND OBSERVERS IN SOCIAL MEDIA Translating this to the realm of social media, I would suggest that the creators of social media and social content are "actors" who might see their creations quite differently from their audiences. We can apply the actor-observer bias to our understanding of the mechanics of social media to suggest: 1. ...how content producers within the network may see their content differently from other users. 2. ...how the community at-large's impressions of our social medium may differ from our own. Let's take a look at each of these in turn. 1. ...how content producers within the network may see their content differently from other users: When any social media user produces content, be it a blog post, status update, profile or link, he or she will likely see the action in the context of the entire network. Conversely, other users will more likely see the action as coming from the content producer's personal disposition. Consider the following familliar scenario, an organization attempts to create viral content using existing viral content as an example, and posts it to social media websites. Often, users interpret the online action as less genuine seeing it through the lens of the organization's internal motivations: unless the content suggests otherwise, a company engaging with social media is likely advertising itself. Since the audience is naturally prone to consider the action coming from the internal motivations of the company, and the advertising organization is biased to benchmark its content based on the social media environment, online social media marketers would do well to focus their efforts on attaching their name to content with real value to users while minimizing any "direct marketing". In a less corporate example, the "actor-observer" bias can be used to explain how Facebook effectively encourages social interaction on their site. With the "news feed", a stream of content updates from one's network, a user is able to browse a large collection of status updates and comment on those that interest him/her in any way. While this user sees his/her actions as merely one social interaction in the context of an active social network, other users will likely consider it as stemming from more of a personal investment in that comment (direct e-mail notifications encourage replies). The initial interaction is encouraged as it seems fleeting, non-commital and part of a larger network, while responses are encouraged as a natural response to what seems like a targeted message. 2. ...how the community at-large's impressions of our social medium may differ from our own: As creators and moderators of social media, the actor-observer bias helps provide a more realistic lens through which we can observe our networks. Imagine you're an application developer working with the Facebook API (or, maybe you are?). When testing the application, you may come across Facebook's connectivity page asking you to sign in (this page forces users to take an extra step to enable integration with Facebook). Considering the application you've developed as something emanating from your behaviour, you would be the "actor" in this situation. It follows that you would not likely to give this standard screen any thought; this inconvenience is merely a product of your application's Facebook development environment. However, the end user of the application, or "observer", will not likely forgive this inconvenience. They would more likely consider this screen as a part of the application itself. You might forgive your own application, knowing that the inconvenience was due to its environment, while the end user considers the inconvenience as a negative trait of the application. As media providers, we shouldn't forget our bias to account for context when evaluating our own interface, and also our users' increased likelihood of judging the interface against our traits and explicit intentions. Using a psychological approach to empathize with our users leads us to an optimized user experience and a better product/application overall. DESIGN FOR THE IRRATIONAL HUMAN MIND While this article was fairly in-depth, it only represents ideas about social media in the context of one, specific socio-cognitive bias. There are countless cognitive biases which have been discovered, and a large majority of them have serious implications on the marketing and design of interactive systems, including social media. The benefits of taking a psychological perspective are clear. Whether you're a product designer, strategic executive, social media startup, user experience designer, marketer, or any other professional which focuses on client-facing elements, your focus should be on end users which are emotional, unpredictable and irrational. It only seems logical to try and understand them. [likebox text="Enjoy this post? "Like" our page to get updates about new posts!"]

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