Designing for Social Context

In my experience designing a communication platform at Paylocity I’ve observed that the way a person perceives their audience affects how they choose engage (or not engage!). If you look at a typical social networking product that is structured around groups of people, the idea that those people communicate differently or not at all depending on who they think is listening seems like a safe hypothesis. When you wrap this dynamic in a workplace context the stakes go up. If anything you say has the potential to affect your career, you are going to be thinking about several things:

• How big is my audience?
• Who is in the audience and how familiar am I with them?
• Can I predict the audience’s reaction to what I say?
• Is there a power imbalance? Do some audience members "outrank" me in the org chart?

These aren’t ground-breaking insights, but it’s easy to forget that these factors exist and affect how people on a social platform choose to show up. In a product structured around groups, people will interact differently in each group depending on how comfortable they are with the audience. It especially helps to remember this when you start talking about engagement metrics like how often someone is posting, commenting or reacting. You can’t compare someone’s average number of posts in a group that the whole company is a part of to how often they post in a small group of their closest collaborators. Engagement will look different depending on the nature of the group, and you have to acknowledge and be okay with that.

Once you accept that people will be feel hesitant to contribute in unfamiliar groups, and decide to support them in feeling that way, you can design in a way that makes interaction with an unfamiliar group feel more comfortable. Maybe you add indicators that show who is in the audience and what their titles are (this could weirdly be a feature designed to prevent posting!). Or what if you added a tone checker to help people feel sure that they are not adopting a negative tone by mistake? Or, you can stop trying to get people to post in situations where they’re uncomfortable and design an interface that encourages less-risky passive interactions like adding reactions instead. With the right definition of engagement, a reaction or post view becomes as valuable as a comment. The most important thing is recognizing how people are feeling and supporting those feelings.

When you are designing a social system, you need to think about all the factors that affect how people choose to communicate. If your goal is to drive up the number of interactions at all costs, but in doing so you trick people into contributing in ways that hurt their careers, or that make them uncomfortable, it will do long-term damage. By helping people understand the social context better you increase trust in your product, and will likely see stronger engagement as a side effect. It might just show up in unexpected ways, or be unevenly distributed throughout the product.