Social: Theories and Models - Foundations for Designing User-Centered Systems - page 249

activity (Fig. 9.1 ; also see Churchill et al. 2001 ), to address how real-time ren-
dering and manipulation of data visualizations affect mediated collaborations
(Snowdon et al. 2003 ), and to understand more deeply the impact of networked
mobile devices on ongoing work and recreational practices (e.g., Brown et al.
2001 ). Research is turning to consideration of how tools like LinkedIn, Facebook,
and Twitter play into organizational information sharing (e.g., Zhao and Rosson
2009 ), and how enterprises are using their own internal bookmark sharing tools to
foster deeper collaboration between their staff (e.g., Millen et al. 2006 ).
Figure 9.2 reminds us that social aspects of systems, like other aspects of
interfaces noted earlier, do not guarantee success. They are just another factor to
consider—another cause of risks, or another way to ameliorate risks in systems.
In this chapter we complement content in Chap. 8 , introducing concepts, the-
ory, and data related to social aspects of face-to-face and mediated communication
and collaboration in our current world of pervasive, networked connectivity.
9.2 Analyzing How People Work Together
9.2.1 Introduction
As discussed in Chap. 8 , people work together in different ways. Ideally you want
them to collaborate and cooperate to carry out any shared tasks that they may have.
When designing a system this means that you want to support collaboration and
cooperation where it is appropriate, and avoid having people spend time inter-
acting with the system when they should be more concerned with carrying out the
task at hand. It is, therefore, important to understand how people collaborate and
cooperate.
There are several ways in which social interactions can be analyzed. Here we
consider three types of analysis that are quite widely used. The first type is fairly
informal and is often used to analyze pairwise interactions, as happens in con-
versation, for example. The second analyzes interactions in terms of costs and
benefits, and is sometimes described as a payoff approach. The third involves
applying network theory to emphasize the inter-relationships between actors
across interactions.
9.2.2 Informal, Pairwise Analyses
The simplest way of analyzing social interactions is fairly informal. It simply notes
results and regularities that appear in social behavior. This is a type of framework
in that it provides some common terms across analyses, and some basic
assumptions, but does not provide or require that the results across analyses fit