Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Junaid A

Junaid A — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 10:23:34 GMT

Great article necessitating the society’s influence on the changing perspective and use of the web.

Technologically advanced societies follow a typical pattern of change and growth. Initially, it will be solely technology that will drive what a user experiences. The features/ attributes of a product basically pick themselves primarily due to lack of options on what technology could provide them. The features that are going to be left behind for subsequent ‘versions’ to incorporate would again be a call for technology to take. With advancement in technology and due to the rising need of bringing in that extra to appear different, stay afloat and above the competition the layer of additional considerations would creep in.

Social media is still in its fledgling stage. There is a lot of excitement and effort underway at exploring what it can offer and the boundaries it can cross which the traditional web was not able to. It is now limited to a certain degree by imagination and to an extent, access and awareness of the right kind of technologies (in the lesser technologically advanced societies). To even recommend that a social media setting is not appropriate, a certain degree of maturity to incorporate the layer of additional considerations has to creep in.

One culture might define one set of best practices based on limitations exactly in the way a different culture defines it based on its attributes. Similar to the presence or absence of certain navigation elements on e-commerce sites (which have gained acceptance to a large extent), it would be very interesting to note what kind of interaction patterns people start associating with social media and how best practices emerge across cultures and find ‘universal’ acceptance.

Junaid A — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 03:06:56 GMT

I totally agree with your comment that cultures have many elements of a global experience to draw upon and that they don’t need to repeat others’ growing pains. Which is why, I strongly believe, the rise of social media has been this rapid.

The growing pains this culture is experiencing are different from what has been experienced earlier mainly because of the extremely rapid rise of social media and the technologies supporting it. I believe that the primary factors holding back technologically advanced cultures from growing even faster (if that was even remotely possible) is the limit of human imagination and the overwhelming nature of this rapid rise – we have a ‘blink and you’ll miss it’ situation right now and it requires that additional effort and interest to stay on top of it.

It would be interesting to delve deeper into what this would actually mean to UX and all of our methods, processes and best practices. I see us UX practitioners ideally placed to influence interaction patterns, interface designs and architect information in social media environments. We are in a position to drive social media best practices and what people start accepting universally as perhaps the ‘social media norm’. The good thing is that this cannot be a one-way design anymore and it will be the users who will easily have the biggest say on this (Two-way Design – Design 2.0).

On the flip side of this, we UX practitioners already have a tough time agreeing on a name for ourselves. These developments will just add to the confusion on what we should call ourselves with the social media tag in our job title. We already have a ‘Social Media Analyst’ role (http://tinyurl.com/djtsul) which has been gaining acceptance and it would be interesting to see more such titles gaining universal acceptance as the field matures.

Junaid A — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 09:40:34 GMT

One could look at this article the other way too as – article that outlines everything that researchers need to know about working with non-researchers. You know you have a smart kid when he reads “Children and how to manage them” and forms an ‘informed’ opinion on how he is being brought up.. :-)

Junaid A — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 20:34:45 GMT

“communication strategies, rapport building, building alliances, using the team approach and training” – aren’t these ‘soft skills’ what every single professional in a set up aims have/develop to climb up the ladder? I am interested though on how you apply these to UX and how you want to define ‘hostage negotiators’.

Junaid A — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 05:28:27 GMT

Thank you for the follow up.
Emotional Intelligence is primarily about one’s ability to read and react ‘right’ to situations. Ability to develop any kind of soft skills is based on how well built one’s emotional abilities are. There is no magic formula – it takes time and experience across different situations to be able to judge right. Specific to our profession and how we could develop and use these soft skills as researchers is just a subset of how best we develop and use these soft skills to be more effective at work every day. I am still interested though to hear your inputs and perspectives on the soft skills we need to build, use and apply for the work we do as UX researchers.

Junaid A — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 15:25:15 GMT

An article – with a few more insights/ perspectives on Social Media and excerpts of our discussion on your article here – is at http://tinyurl.com/klyb8t