Welcome back. In this video, I want to discuss interacting beyond individuals. How to mind the social sciences to design socio-technical systems. A socio-technical system is a social system operating on a technical base. Examples of socio-technical systems include, Wikipedia, Ebay, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Compared to designing traditional software or hardware product, designing the user experience in socio-technical system is quite challenging. Even if the designer wants the socio-technical system to be larger, or more active, or more friendly in tone. He or she may not be able to make that happen. The reason is that people are the key factor that influences a user's experience in socio-technical systems. People are interacting with other people in these systems. Therefore, people's behaviors, reactions, or responses cannot be easily shaped or programmed in the way physical materials or software can. Particularly in Kraut and Resnick's 2011 book, they proposed a five critical challenges to design a successful social-technical system. First, a successful, socio-technical system relies on rich content to attract new users. For example, new members that are attracted to YouTube because there are thousands of interesting video clips all the participants have posted. People use Facebook because their friends constantly post updates about their lives. However, one of the designers tried to create a new social-technical system form scratch. Therefore, they are faced with critical mass problem. That is, the site does not have enough content to start with. Second, for most social-technical systems, a major challenge is to identify, attract and socialize members, who have the characteristic, skills, and the motivation to contribute. Even established systems must attract their stream of new members, to replace those who leave. Encouraging commitment is another challenge. Commitment represents people's feelings of attachment or connection to a group, organization, community, or social-technical system. Once a social-technical system attracts new members, they want to keep the members around by increasing their commitment to the system. Next, to be successful, social-technical systems not only want to keep their members around, but also want their members to contribute the content on which the group's existence is built. Finally, the people who participate in online groups often have different, and sometimes competing, interests. People who, for example, people often post controversial, irreverent or off-topic messages to provoke other users into an emotional response. The challenge here is to regulate some people's inappropriate behaviors and limit the damage these behaviors might cost to the whole system. So in this video I want to briefly talk about how social sciences can help to deal with these critical challenges. Economics and the various branches of psychology, especially organizational behavior, social psychology, offer theories of individual motivation and human behavior in social settings. Properly interpreted, these theories can inform design choices about how to build a successful system. Let us take feedback as an example. Feedback can be in the form of messages, writings, or simply a button to click to indicate liking or disliking of something. Basically feedback tells people how others have reacted to people's participation. Social science theories tell us that different types of feedback like positive feedback, negative feedback, directive feedback, social feedback, can have very different effects on different people. Like newcomers, old-timers on different levels, like self level, task levels. So, here are two real feedback messages editors receive from Wikipedia. The first message is an example of positive feedback. This editor just sent a message to another, says that I'm so impressed, this is a very fine article. The second message is an example of negative feedback. There is a concern that the rationale you have provided for using this image under fair use may be invalid. If it is determined that this image does not qualify under fair use, it will be deleted within a couple of days. According to social science theorists, positive feedback signals that performance exceeds the standards. Therefore, when people receive positive feedback, although they are encouraged, perhaps to typically remain their efforts or even reduce efforts to the specific task. Negative feedback, although it might discourage people, also signals that their performance falls short of standards, leading people to increase efforts to what are specific tasks. While appropriately using both positive feedback and negative feedback, social technical systems like Wikipedia can modify people's contributions, direct their contributions to important tasks, and coordinate these contributions to maximize the benefits for the whole system. Here is a take-away. Social sciences are very good tools to guide the design of socio-technical systems. If you are interested in knowing more about mining social science to design these successful systems, you can read the following book and the papers. Thank you for watching this video. I hope we can see in the next one.
