Social aspects of UI design
We are driven by the need to belong and to have the approval of our peers. This urge to connect is our essence because of its ability to raise our chances of survival. When we act in according to the beliefs, suggestions and commands of the collective, it helps us to reach our goals, including the most primal of food and shelter. Since the nomadic times, when we began hunting in our immediate families we quickly learned that joining forces and hunting together in larger groups meant bigger kills and greater chances of avoiding hunger. For over 100,000 years, we have traded and exchanged between groups in order to draw upon other's specialization and raise each other's living standards.
We all know little bits of information, but none of us know everything. Through exchange, we've surpassed our own knowledge, creating the ability for us to do things that we, as individuals, can't even comprehend. For example, we all know what a toaster is, but how many of us can make one entirely on our own? We'd need to know how to drill for oil, how to make plastic, how to wire electrics, how to create heating elements, how to create screws, how to extract and melt metal, and the list goes on. In order for humanity to evolve, it's not important how intelligent the individual is, but how well we communicate and cooperate as a people. By evolving to communicate and have language, we became even more connected and increased our chances of survival. We could warn each other of danger, guide each other and share wisdom. But with this ability to speak, also came the need to be heard.
Another way that we learned to cooperate was through imitation. When we observe someone doing an activity, our brain has 'mirror neurons' that mimic the activity as if we were doing it ourselves. Through this imitation we quickly learn new skills and behaviors, from birth all the way through adulthood. Humans are social beings and because of this we will always use technology to be social as a form of self expression. If we look at the history of the internet, we can see how this happened as the internet itself was intended for military purposes but evolved to connect the world socially. Since it's beginning, this happened over and over again, from IRC to BBS systems to Friendster, Myspace, Geocities, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Flickr and Facebook. We have adapted the internet to speak our language, a language of interconnectedness and sharing.
Today, nearly four out of five web users visits a social networking site on a monthly basis. Twitter estimates that it has at least 325 million users every 24 hours. Facebook claims that its users spend over 700 billion minutes on the site each month. We communicate online. We share online. And we look for guidance online. With regards to the last one, we can see this brilliantly demonstrated with something called the people-powered product research. This is a pattern where internet shoppers commonly go to Amazon.com first, often skipping the content written by Amazon to scroll down to the user reviews. Users look at other people's experiences with the product and find guidance on whether or not to invest in it themselves, thus learning from our shared experiences and knowledge.
From the initial stages of UX research, we can see the importance of user observation based on our skill of imitation. By observing a user in person, our brains imitate their actions allowing us to better comprehend the activities they partake in. This strengthens our understanding of their needs and task flows, and allows us to create solutions with greater empathy and clarity of the problem. When it comes to designing the UX, we need to take into consideration the necessity for a social outlet within our website or application. Allow for greater social interconnectedness in your designs so that people can go to each other for guidance and advice within your application, such as with ratings, reviews, news and forums. Allow users to forge helpful relationships, be it with similar users or with customer support. Give people an awareness of the size of the community they operate in to give them a sense of belonging as well as the choice of where they want to fit in within the community by establishing their profile.
Thanks to the social nature of humans and all of the connections people have been making through the use of technology, we have invented and evolved more tools in the past 100 years, than we did in a million years back in our hunter-gatherer days with the design evolution of our hand tools. Today, everyone is able to have their ideas and allow them to be shared on a global scale. It is because of this that we as a people are accelerating our rate of innovation, and we should encourage this in every way we can.