Social: Social Cognition and Teamwork - Foundations for Designing User-Centered Systems - page 241

the tasks they need to perform, or on communicating plans and results, this will have
a detrimental effect on the work processes and outcomes. Ultimately, staff may
simply stop using the new technology because it gets in the way of them doing their
job.
You should try to design your system in such a way that it minimizes the
possibility of diffusion of social responsibility. Things that enable diffusion include
getting aggregate rather than individual inputs, allowing people to be anonymous,
and setting goals where no specific person is invited to contribute. Techniques that
are widely used to help avoid diffusion of responsibility include providing rep-
resentations of the people involved that can be seen by other users, by allowing
reputations to be built according to system usage and expertise, and by making any
requests for assistance appear more directed to individuals than to a group.
The attribution of causality suggests that responsibility can be moderated.
Partly this has to be done by the user, but the breakout box on email suggests that
email systems might be more apologetic and clear about what went wrong, and
email systems are getting better about noting how and why mail was not delivered.
This knowledge can help the sender understand why the receiver might or might
not receive an email. Similar effects and results can be imagined for phone calls,
text messages, and IMs.
If you are designing a very large system, of the scale of Yelp, for example, you
may want to encourage participation by helping the users perceive the system as
being smaller than it really is. To avoid overwhelming the user, Yelp does this by
creating local regions where you search by town or area. It can also be helpful to
have friendly faces available in the system to provide mutual support, and to
provide moderators (in areas like online forums) as legitimate authority figures to
help encourage pro-social behavior. You may also need to think about how you
provide the appropriate social distance between people using the system (e.g.,
increasing it by using formal titles, such as Dr. Smith, or reducing it by using first
names such as John, or even nicknames).
You will need to think about how and why people are motivated to use your
system to carry out their particular tasks. Do they use it because they have to (are
they paid to use it to do their job, for example)? Or do they use it because they
want to use it (the classic example here being social networking systems)? Is their
motivation extrinsic or intrinsic? That is, are they self-motivated because of their
own interest, or because they will get a reward from an external source for doing
it? Even in the case of developing a social networking system, there may be a need
for extrinsic motivation to make sure that people keep the system active by pro-
viding new content, although the rewards for doing this may not be financial. You
could highlight how the system increases their mastery, gives them autonomy, and
increases the importance of doing the task. The balance between motivations may
not always be clear cut. Some learning tasks, for example, will require a coach
who sets tasks (which may be necessary, but are not necessarily intrinsically
rewarding) for people to complete as part of their learning experience. Any reward
structure for task performance needs to be appropriately aligned to teams and to
individuals. If the rewards are targeted at individuals, and individual performance,