e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Joel-Spolsky

  • A Different Take on Social Interfaces

    A while back, I wrote a rant on Joel Spolsky’s conception of something he calls “social interface design.” Now there’s a thought-provoking piece out of IBM that defines “social interface” in a second and completely different way:

    Social interface theory is built on the results of various studies demonstrating that humans respond socially in their interactions with machines.7-9 Humans are inclined to treat everything as social and natural. Therefore, they automatically and subconsciously use, whenever possible, what they know about their natural and social experiences to help them with their technological experiences. Carroll describes an experiment in which simulated intelligent help was given to users. Although the users praised the help system for assisting them in certain situations, in other situations the users blamed the system for their problems and attributed social traits to the system such as “fussy” and “distrustful.”

    In this version of social interface theory, what we are studying is the ways in which humans relate to machines as social beings. Note that this approach also has implications for social interface theory in the way that Spolsky means it; since facets of the machine interface are proxies for the interactions of the humans who are using them (e.g., avatars, smiley faces, textual expression…even presence indicators), then understanding how we respond socially to these computer interface devices in general can teach us something about how effectively they can represent communication cues from human beings.

  • Designing the Anti-Social Interface: A Rant

    Joel Spolsky (of “Joel on Software” fame) has been getting a lot of attention lately for his observation that software designers need to think about the impact their designs have on the way their software mediates between people. In general, I’m all for this, as you might gather from my posts here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. If you’ve read even a few of these posts, you know that there’s a lot more attention being paid to social interfaces by a lot more people than Joel suggests (although he is correct that a lot more work needs to be done to gather this work under the auspices of one field of study and disseminate what we have learned so far). Off the top of my head, the earliest work on internet-based social interfaces that I know of is Phil Greenspun’s. As far back as the mid-nineties, Greenspun built an Open Source toolkit called the ArsDigita Community System (ACS) that was designed (as you might guess from its name) as social software. It was originally built to support Photo.net, an early internet knowledge-sharing community that still thrives today. The software also became the toolkit for Greenspun’s now-defunct consulting company and the ancestor of the still-thriving OpenACS toolkit and community as well as the basis for the dotLRN Open Source LMS. Spolsky surely knows about Greenspun’s work; in fact, in his younger (humbler?) days, he freely admitted that Greenspun had been a major inspiration to his own career path. It’s somewhat disappointing to see that Joel fails to acknowledge the foundational work of his one-time virtual hero, despite the fact that it’s clear that Joel’s own ideas about discussion board design are derivative of (in the cases of the good ideas) or reacting to (in the cases of at least a couple of the bad ideas) Greenspun’s work.

    Which brings me to my main beef. (more…)