Social: Theories and Models - Foundations for Designing User-Centered Systems - page 269

social distances between people, either increasing it, through the use of formal
titles (e.g., Dr. Ritter), or reducing it by just using first names (e.g., Frank) or
nicknames (Killer-ace).
The way that people interact will be affected by the goals, costs, and payoffs
(benefits) involved, so you should make them clear and attractive. If goals are
shared, then you need to think about how people make decisions about those goals,
and the actions that need to be taken to achieve those goals. If the decisions are
shared, then you have to think about how you will share information between the
people involved. Although the team may self-support and self-regulate, you should
consider the need for an authority figure to moderate behavior, where appropriate.
Remember that the make-up of the team is likely to change over time, so you need
to consider how to deal with experienced people leaving the team and new people
joining the team, which will affect overall system performance.
You will need to think about how and why people are motivated to use your
system. 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). 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 providing 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, so 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.
If your system will support many users working together as a team, you will
need to be aware of the potential diffusion of responsibility and how you can guard
against this. One way of doing so is to make sure that any requests are directed at
specific people rather than general groups. You can also make the requester appear
more human by associating personal images or details with their request, because
people are more likely to respond to real requests from real people!
The factors that influence team performance may be relatively well known, but
it may not always be possible to ensure that all the factors are optimal. As noted
above, teams that are (1) more cohesive, (2) who have worked together longer, and
(3) who share more values will perform better. You need to be able to support
teams with these attributes, but also help teams that do not have all of the attributes
to achieve them. Reducing social distance may help to make the team more
cohesive, and sharing information can lead to the sharing of values.
In addition to the team level issues, you will also need to think about organiza-
tional issues. If an organization has procedures in place for how a particular job has
to be done, for example, then you will need to think about whether these procedures
will have to be changed. If the procedures are imposed by a regulatory authority
(as in nuclear power, for example) then you may not be able to change those
procedures, so you will have to design your system to support those procedures.