socialnetworks

[Event] IxDADC + DCIA Present "Understanding Social Media, Accelerating Social Participation" June 10th

Ben Shneiderman and Jenny Preece Presenting: "Understanding Social
Media, Accelerating Social Participation"

RSVP http://ixdadc.ning.com/events/understanding-social-media

Date: June 10th, 2009

Location:
Bethesda Chevy Chase Regional Service Center
4805 Edgemoor Lane
Bethesda, MD

Time: 6pm to 7:45pm

"Billions of people participate in online social activities. Some
users participate as readers of discussion boards, searchers of blog
posts, or viewers of photos.

UX testing on social networks

As a commercial agency we are getting more and more UX design work in
the social network area. (which is good news)

One of the issues that we have come up against is how difficult it
can be to test the user experience on social network sites.

The way we use these sites evolves over time, so its not possible to
get a realistic assessment in a one hour user test.

encourage the use of real name

As with any social networking applications, the quality of a given social
graph heavily depends on whether your users are using their real name in
their profile. Certain features such as 'people search' won't even be usable
if users don't use real name when signing up.

So the question is how do you encourage user to use their real name instead
of their nickname. We can't really prevent a user from signing up using a
fake/nickname and there's really no way to tell anyway.