Social Software in Business environments
Friday, May 06, 2005
Social software is software that enables and/or encourages social behaviour of certain type. It is both, an old and a new concept. Social software has been around the software development field for decades but known by different names, like groupware or CSCW. (You can learn more about the history of Social Software in Christopher Allen's excellent article Tracing the evolution of social software.) Social software is new in the sense that it is an attempt (the first?) to recognise the social aspects of software. So far software and software development have been guided purely by mechanistic perspectives. I don't think this is completely wrong because software is also 0s and 1s in computer chips. However, there is also another side of software which has been neglected, the human and social one. Software is part of our daily lifes, we read our e-mail every day, we read the newspaper online everymorning, we buy online, cellular phones, play station, etc. ... and in business settings it is part of our jobs. Software plays an important role at supporting the social interactions in organisations. Regardless of the type of application, payroll, ERP, workflow, groupware, e-mail or online forum, there are always *people* using the software and possibly interacting through them.
For me, when software developers develop business applications they need to consider two aspects of their users, the user as an individual and the user as a group. So far the user as an individual has been addressed in the guidelines for usability. There are very well known and proven practices that allow developers to create userfriendly, intuitive and attractive applications, that users will be willing to use. However, I haven't seen guidelines for *group-sability* so far. I think that the emergence of social software as a new field would bring more development in this area.
Off the top of my head--> I am not sure if prototyping would be useful for *groups-ability* as it is for usability design. It is easy to sit with a user and design a screen in front of him/her and see whether s/he thinks it is easy to use or not. However, how could we *see* the social interactions happening when a group of people is using a software? I think Ethnography could give us some answers in this regard... (but off course who's gonna pay for an ethnographer to be observing people for weeks or even months while you could be delivering software and charging for it?) Probably an adaptation of ethnographic practices could help, some sort of ethnography which is led by feedback from users.
For me, when software developers develop business applications they need to consider two aspects of their users, the user as an individual and the user as a group. So far the user as an individual has been addressed in the guidelines for usability. There are very well known and proven practices that allow developers to create userfriendly, intuitive and attractive applications, that users will be willing to use. However, I haven't seen guidelines for *group-sability* so far. I think that the emergence of social software as a new field would bring more development in this area.
Off the top of my head--> I am not sure if prototyping would be useful for *groups-ability* as it is for usability design. It is easy to sit with a user and design a screen in front of him/her and see whether s/he thinks it is easy to use or not. However, how could we *see* the social interactions happening when a group of people is using a software? I think Ethnography could give us some answers in this regard... (but off course who's gonna pay for an ethnographer to be observing people for weeks or even months while you could be delivering software and charging for it?) Probably an adaptation of ethnographic practices could help, some sort of ethnography which is led by feedback from users.
Labels:
social software,
software development
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This is interesting, and so far just a few people have suggested new ways of designing this type of software. The difference with traditional software is that when people interact one should not cast these interactions too rigidly, as any human being can follow or not follow the interactions that designers have planned. In this regard ethnography could be useful but to some extent. If software could allow people to design new interactions that could help.
El pato
I agree, however, I would also say that social software can also be used as a tool for aiding and promoting illegal activities. The auditing of online activities is becoming more crucial but how will (normal) people react at more controlled and supervised online environments?