User Experience Design And Social Networks In China
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Introduction
By the end of December in 2012, China has 5.64 hundred million internet users, the internet Penetration grows up to 42.1%. Besides, the mobile internet users increased to 4.2 hundred million at the same year. With the development of internet, social networks has been increased wildly in China. Approximately, 60% netizens check their social network every day, 38.2% of them check more than twice a day, 20.3% netizens will at least log in once (Nielsen China 2012). Why are people so obsessed with social networks? What within the magical website keeps attracting them to come back again and again? Obviously, People could share experiences as well as emotions instantly through social networks , no matter where they are. Definitely each social network have their own powerful competitiveness, which should mainly exists in their distinction of interaction design. " Interaction design is the creation of a dialogue between a person and a product, service or system."1 This dialogue is usually found in the behaviors. To design behaviors requires an understanding of the fluidity of natural dialogue, which is both 1 Kolko, Jon. Thoughts on interaction design. Morgan Kaufmann, 2010. 83. 2 reactionary and anticipatory at the same time. It is easy to realize that a good network is one offers a good or memorable story that the user will engage with, and pass on to others, either by sharing the artifact or talking about it (Kolko 2011). This study will inquiry the relationship between interaction design and social networks through a case study. Within the case study, two popular Chinese social networks, which are QQ and SINA Weibo, will be compared through aspects from social communication and interaction design. Through those two popular social website, this study will dig deep into relationship between social network, social communication and interaction design, especially the effects of interaction design on social communication. How does different interaction design in these two examples shape people thoughts, needs, wants, behaviors, habits in their social life? How differently do people interact with different interaction design on social networks?" Review of the literature
As the main focus of this study is relationship between interaction design and social communication in atmosphere of social networks, therefore, literature will come from interaction design, emotional design and social networks. Literature review meant to ground this inquiry, focused on the emerging field of design research literature to understand current proposed models of design research and more specifically, interaction design research. Literature review on interaction design will contain user experience design, usability, and emotional design. "Interaction design should be desirable-beautiful, elegant, and appropriate-regardless of the medium chosen to visualize a solution"(Kolko 2011). Interaction design plays an important role in shaping social communication and social network through a creation of visual language. When it comes to interaction design, it does not mean the behaviors of interface, it talks about the behaviors of people. Adobe, which is one of the leading companies in interaction design indicates the five principles in interaction design. They are consistency, visibility, learnability, predictability and feedback. People are sensitive to change, so consistency of each web pages could avoid unexpected attention. Besides, people could not interact with devices unless they see the possibility, therefore visibility is important for users to understand what choices they have. Besides, if they use one function and get the result as expected, users will get involved into the experience and improve their performance in next step. Also, users will perform better if predictability exists. Predictability means during the experience users could see what is going to be next or what outcomes they will have. Last, people need additional information in the experience to tell where they are and what they are doing. Thus, feedback will offer information like how long they need to wait, which steps they have in total, etc. Based on the five principles, therefore, within social network, " user needs should be considered as early as possible, before and during the concept generation phase" (Bruseberg et al. 2000). These online social interactions not only occur in a new way of communication, but also parallel with offline “real” life (Williams 2006).Literature review on this area could help researcher with understanding of basic interaction design requirement on social website. Different from other authors, Don Norman points out an interesting view to evaluate interaction design in his book, Emotional Design: why we love (or hate) everyday thing. Here Norman argues that the emotional side of design may be more important than the practical side. This is because aesthetically pleasing objects have a better chance of being adopted and used, because the user is better disposed towards them. In contrast, "usability design as a field is rooted in cognitive science; as such, it fails to acknowledge the role of emotion in human interactions with objects" (Leung 2008). Most of the social networking are involved with social media, as it is also a tool to interact with other users. Media of representation extend the range of shared attention, providing us with an enormous repertoire of behaviors and ideas, and with a wide range of strategies for preserving them and sharing them with one another (Murray 2011). Social network get popular as online hangout spaces for people in all ages. "People flock to them to socialize with their friends and acquaintances, to share information with interested others, and to see and be seen (Boyd 2011)." Salah points it out in his article that today's network technology could not only provide people with videos and information to learn and play, but also generate the Big Data itself by creating platforms over people's social lives, and get transformed into their behavior patterns. Thus, network might be a tool for people to gather for social, cultural, and civic purposes, and they help people connect with a world beyond their close friends and family . Social networks like the Weibo, and QQ allow users to create their own sub-culture based on the platform they offered. What's more, this approach of communication online is changing the way people live in their daily life step by step. Papacharissi comments that ‘‘the architecture of virtual spaces, much like the architecture of physical spaces, simultaneously suggests and enables particular modes of interaction. "Social network sites are similar to many other genres of social media and online communities that support computer-mediated communication, but what defines this particular category of website is the combination of features that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of others with whom they share a connection, and (3)view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system (Boyd & Ellison, 2007). Conceptual Framework (graphically represented) Based on the focus of relationship between social network and interaction design, conceptual framework was created and illustrated below. Research Topics & Questions
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