I am looking at how people develop conventions in social software. For example, in chat sessions a convention began of using :) to represent a smiley face. At first, only creative people figured out to do this, then as others saw this usage they adopted it also. Currently, almost everyone who uses online chat recognizes this idiom, and most chat clients have built-in technological support for this, giving a drop-down menu of smiley choices and converting this text string into a graphical image. Below are some examples I have culled together of different interfaces that support conventions. Each of them has two aspects: the method of input that users can use to communicate, and a feedback section for how they see the effects of their input. ConventionsResearchDesign shows the research design I'm working on.

Example Interfaces

Instant Messaging

• There are two ways of inputing smileys. First is a free-text field where users type their chat messages, and these messages can include the text-string smileys. Second is a drop-town box that can be gotten by clicking on the smiley in the editing menu.

• Above the input fields is the chat window, which contains the current conversation. Smileys are converted to a graphical image in these chats:

• These examples are from GAIM for Windows

Del.icio.us

• Delicious is a social bookmarking site, where you can submit webpages as bookmarks, and give these webpages single-word tags that others can use to find these bookmarks. I am interested in conventions around these tags.

• There are numerous ways of submitting a webpage to delicious. The basic interface just has a free-text box:

• An extended interface lists 1) recommended tags used for that page, 2) all of the users tags, and 3) popular tags on the system. A user can click on any of these words and they will be added to the free-text field above. They user can also at any time type his own tags into that field.

• Tags can be seen under the link with the name of the page on any of the bookmark lists.

• Conventions form in the naming of tags. For example, some people use the string via: followed by where they found the link to classify that. Also, many people use tags that are only personally meaningful, such as readlater.

Flickr

* Flickr is similar to Del.icio.us, but it allows you to post your digital pictures for others to see and tag those pictures. The tagging is different because you are tagging your own content as opposed to other people's content. * Flickr has a very simple free-text box for the tags with minimal instructions. * Flickr does not display tags along with the pictures, so there is a minimal feedback. However, with a little bit of site navigation, it is possible to get a list of a user's tags and view all the pictures with that tag. The list comes in an interesting form, where font size indicates the relative number of images with that tag.

RideNow

• The RideNow? project uses a drop-down box with common entries followed by a free-text field as its input mechanism.

• When RideNow? displays its list of rides, it shows how people have input their dates and locations, which serves as feedback to users. Notice the conventions -- While "The Union" is a specific building, it is still OK to specify "Main Street" as a destination, which is a more general location.

Google Suggest

• Google Labs has a suggest feature for their search interface. It uses a completion dropdown to suggest search terms that might be interesting. It has an indirect feedback mechanism by listing how many hits each search term has. Users do not get to see other user's queries directly, nor do they have a clue which queries were actually chosen.

Commonalities

• All of the interfaces have some form of free-text entry system.
• Many of the interfaces also have some form of list from which the user can select common entries.
• Most of the interfaces have feedback in the form of seeing what others have entered, but only one (Flickr) has feedback about how frequently it was entered.

Author: Rick Wash May 2005