Social centered design

Social centered design (SCD) is a design philosophy for designing social media technology based products that encompasses all user centered design principles along with the following key characteristics:

* Emotional
** People choose to use social media products. People have to use enterprise and productivity applications because it’s what their company told them they have to use.
** Unlike enterprise or productivity applications, social applications have an emotional aspect to it. The design needs encourage and anticipate emotional responses. It needs to be fun or bring joy or laughter to the user.
** For example, ‘Watching silly YouTube videos makes me laugh.’ ‘I like to see what my friends’ are doing.’

* Community
** Sense of belonging
** Sense of ownership
** Community driven and regulated
** Enable sense of community

* Integrated
** Needs to be part of their daily ritual: Needs to be integrated with person’s lifestyle or everyday life. Allowing people to use it anywhere at anytime.
** Integrated with the greater social network- other apps: Easily connect and share information with their other social applications (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, etc.)
** Multi-platform and Multimodal
*** Web, mobile, easily ‘mashable’ (see definition of Web2.0)
*** Photos, video, audio

* Incentives
** What’s in it for me? Needs clear incentives or value for users. What’s the reward for users to interact with the product? To create an account? To provide content (photos, video, audio, personal statements, etc.)? To return to the site?
** Accomplishments and rewards
*** Along with being useful and tapping into the emotions of the user, users want to ‘feel’ rewarded for contributing to the site.
** Personalization
*** Personal identity: avatars, screen name, branding
*** Personal sections/pages: I want my own stuff.
*** See and interact with their social network: what are my friends doing? What do they like? Who else has the same interest as me?

* Interactions
** Distribution not Centralization: push and pull of information. No longer just pushing information to the user.
** Sharing: email to friend, download, subscribe, invite, add to other social networks
** Contribute: ratings, reviews, favorites, wikis, calendars, comments, tags, discussion boards
** Conversations: comment and replies
** Feedback 360: 360 discussions and reviews on businesses, companies, and products
Reference
* Wordpress Blog: [http://uxminute.wordpress.com/2008/12/23/top-5-characteristics-to-consider-for-social-media-technology-based-products-my-eureka-ux-moment-for-social-centered-design-scd/ Top 5 Characteristics to Consider for Social Media Technology Based Products: My Eureka UX Moment for Social Centered Design (SCD)]
* [http://trendwatching.com/briefing/#feedback Consumer Trends for 2009: Feedback 3.0]
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