Introducing symbolic interaction: A social lens to explore user experience

As researchers, we use multiple ways to reduce the risks in product and service design. We test the visual metaphor on the interface and we test if the interactions are intuitive to the users. These are definitely important for good user experience, but I’d like to talk about why it is also important to consider users’ social world to better understand the relations between users and products and services. Most importantly, I’d introduce a social theory called symbolic interaction as lens for design research.

Let me begin with a weird experience of mine. I came to Australia to study in 2014 and I lived in Melbourne, this is the swimming pool I usually went in Hawthorn. In the beginning I saw people were training hard and they swam quiet without too much talking to each other. I didn’t know why it was bit strange to me. Then I jumped in the pool a few times and I figured it out. It’s the ambience!

This pool is quiet, tidy and professional, which is good. But the swimming pool I was familiar with in China oftentimes don’t look at this. But more like this:

Even the real situation may be not as terrible as this, but every summer, some swimming pools are crowded enough and make you think you are like playing footy in the water.

You may notice from the picture, the people in the pool are actually families, couples, and friends. For these people, the pool is a place for anything but not training, it’s more of a social place where people hang out in hot summer.

In different social contexts, the swimming pool refers to different meanings. The difference of such meanings are defined in people’s social interactions rather than the swimming pool itself.

I’d like to introduce to you this theory about social interaction and the meaning of things. It’s called symbolic interactionism and it’s nothing about swimming pool. The theory was developed from Herbert Blumer in his classic book in 1969.

The theory proposes three principles.

Let me explain it in a simple way. One day afternoon, after lunch, you want to have an apple, you walk into Coles, but find out you don’t have enough money to buy an apple. Someone came to you. Turned out that was Hugh Jackman. He said: hey mateI have money, I can buy that apple for you!

And he did. You were excited because you know he’s a super star and you asked him if you could have his signature. So his signature is on the apple. But after that you don’t want to eat the apple anymore, why? Not only because the ink is on it, but you wanna show it off in front of your friends.

The meaning of apple has changed from something to be eaten to a story with a film star. What has changed the meaning of the apple is the social interactions you had with the celebrity.

I want to highlight the second principle from symbolic interaction — the meaning of things are defined in social interactions. I’m gonna tell you a case about the organizational learning, and how its meaning was shaped in social context.

I was working as a design consultant, one of our financial clients approached to us and asked to research their business bankers. The problem they were facing was that the business bankers were demotivated in front of their internal training system.

It’s a system containing all kinds of online lectures and assignments around banking. Our client has dedicated so much time on developing the online course for their bankers, but they just don’t love it.

We assumed that the contents were not well designed so the bankers considered the courses were under qualified for their professional levels. So we did workshops with stakeholders and interviewed them about how they would develop and improve the internal training. We interviewed business bankers about what courses they want to join for their banking career development.

However, the research findings challenged our assumptions. It is true there were problems with the online courses, but the main reason that the bankers were demotivated to use the internal training system is they much prefer learning in human interactions: they would love to learn by shadowing and talking to peers or people leaders in any circumstance. Communicating with people is much better of a learning method than with the computer. In this case, the meaning of the online training system became a result of organizational compliance, like what they said in the interviews,

“Our online training system is usually a waste of my time, because I was exhausted after a full day working and still need to finish the training courses. But I have to do it because it’s required and connecting to my scorecard.“

and

“I’d rather learning from my colleagues and my managers, learning while doing is much more effective than the computer-based training systems.”

When the bank initially designed the training system for their bankers, the goal and meaning are providing opportunities for the employees to acquire professional knowledge and to develop their career.

But the social circumstance has changed the nature of training and development. When the bankers are communicating with other people and learning from them, in comparison, the online training system became a stress.

In the bankers’ perspective, training is not learning. Training could be an isolated procedure such as they sit in front of the computer and complete the lecture videos and the assignments. They can barely connect these activities with career growth. Learning process must be reflective and social. Only in socially interactive environment could they shadow, enquire and improve.

Another study I’ve done is about money. When we talk about money in experience design, we talk about financing experience. But money has been defined in different ways in social connections beyond financial activities.

During my PhD study, I was cooperating with one of the banks in Australia. The research target was the Chinese Millennial generation because the group is becoming the main consuming force in China. They are making a huge economic contribution outside their country as well. That bank was keen to understand this young generation’s banking experience in order to get prepared to grow their service in China.

So I thought, ok it’s a bank, and you are interested in the Chinese Millennials, who are also called the Generation Y, so let’s study how the Gen Y banking experience is, how they communicate with banks and use banks.

But after a few rounds of meetings, we decided we start from a more fundamental level, which is exploring the concept of money rather than only the behaviour of using banks. We were more interested in the role that money plays in Millennials life, because we assumed that the meanings of money decide how people use the bank services rather than the other way around.

I went to Shanghai, I interviewed the Millennial participants and did workshops with them. I synthesized the data to find out the themes the most important is I used symbolic interactionism. I created a framework that makes the intangible theory a bit more tangible in data analysis.

It’s a straightforward structure inheriting the principles of the original theory. The framework consists of a symbol, the social interactions, and one or a few meanings. The symbol could be a physical thing like a printer, or a digital product like Airbnb, or even just a concept like Internet of Things.

The social interactions is a layer in between, it’s has an effect on the interpretation process where people convert the symbol to meanings.

On the right side, one of the symbols is “saving money”, I imagined “money saving” was a way to achieve financial goals like to buy a pricey stuff, but the Chinese Millennials actually save money as a habit since young age because their parents instructed them to do it. The results validated my assumptions, there is no stable concepts of money. Saving money is more of a social behaviour rather than a pure financial one.

I’d share with you a few of the insights concluded from my study:

The millennials often don’t make rational purchase decisions. Their social surroundings such as friends and families have a great influence on what they want to buy or not. Sometimes it was just simply a recommendation -

A college student described that she was not interested in milk tea at all, but just because she saw her roommate bought the milk tea outside their campus everyday, she began to buy milk tea and got addicted to it, which is NOT healthy.

One of the reasons of this social influence is that, the young people usually share an apartment with others, whether students or the young people who just started working, they are living together to share the bills and rents. The collective life leads to the collective and irrational decision making.

Another thing I found is that money became a festival ritual and social media has made this ritual widely and quickly spread. The best example is WeChat Lucky Money.

I assume most of us have heard of WeChat, it’s an instant messaging app incorporating different functions like bills payment, money transactions, and mobile games. It took advantage of a Chinese traditional culture, which is lucky money. Lucky money refers the tradition where the Older people pack a certain amount of money into a read envelop and give it to young kids during Chinese New Year and wish them good luck, it’s a way of showing love and care.

On WeChat, one user could send out an amount of lucky money, they can choose to send it to either one friend or a group of friends; if it’s a group, then the people in that group need to click into the money bag and grab a random amount of money. The fun is not totally about how much money people grabbed from each other, but the money became the catalyst for social connection.

One of the participants said she sent luck money to her supervisor as a thank you-gift, and in that case WeChat lucky money is a good way to express appreciation without being too formal.

Another one said he sent lucky money to his girlfriend as an apology. He told me the story that on his girlfriend’s birthday, he was as quiet as usual, and his girlfriend thought he was preparing a big surprise. But the surprise was he totally forgot that day was her birthday.

So the meaning of money is much diversified in social interactions. The money transaction process is no more just a money movement, it shows the value of gift giving.

Another finding is the Chinese millennials unconditionally trust the senior people in their families. Especially trust the suggestions on money. They have a strong motivation for saving money because their parents keep suggesting them to save money for emergencies.

Oftentimes when they buy something they would consider how much money they can save by the end of the month. The trust has become a strong family bond that influences their major financing decisions. The traditional financial institutions consider the single interaction between their financial services and the consumers, but the consumers make decisions collectively no matter how individualistic the culture is.

If we study a product experience, we are all familiar with a typical design research model: we have a product, be it digital or physical, we create a space where people interact with the product for a while, and we use different methods to collect the observable interactions, those are the user behaviours. Finally we analyze the behaviours and we find out the emotional feedback that are the user experience.

But social stories are like invisible liquid. They infiltrate the product behaviour and experience. Social stories are the narratives of social interaction. Users can talk to people, observe people and imitate people, and the social interactions occur in different forms such as speech, postures, and gestures. These interactions skew and interrupt users behaviours and feelings toward products, which is usually out of our expectations. They are sayable but not visible. We never know these stories unless we reveal them and make them obvious through our research.

I introduced symbolic interaction, but how does it contribute to design research. Symbolic interaction suggests a design research framework. It helps to reveal the diversity of product meanings in users’ social stories.

A few takeaways:

We are always talking about context. But we should explore the rich “human context” rather than just product pain points. In data collection, we can add a few questions on the people around the users, by whom the users are influenced the most and in what way? If the research is on a specific product feature, it’s worth of understanding whether they use the feature with someone else, have they heard of their friends’ experience in using the products, what do they think of those experience etc. It’s not harmful to ask these questions, they often surprise you how complicated people are in the social stories instead of just in the human-product relationship.

Don’t abandon the social stories just because they are not fixing an immediate problem! I’ve seen this too many times, stakeholders love the insights that can help fix a product problem right away. If the insights are indirect to fixing something, they are usually ignored.

The social stories are not for fixing, but more for inspiring and innovating.

We don’t just put the social stories aside, but we analyze the social stories because product features can change in a day, but the human social context is fairly stable. When we synthesize, we may find users talk about a good or bad experience with the product, and the experience may involve other people pick them up and spread them out in an ecosystem map.

The relationship of the users, the products and the critical social networks will tell you how and why a certain experience occurred. Possibly it’s not a product problem at all but a social problem.

Take advantage of the social interactions and make the product experience more fun. We can use symbolic interaction in a reversed way in ideation process. Rather than waiting until research insights come to surprise us, like “oh! users do x,y,z because they are influenced by others!” But how can we make the experience more entertaining through social interactions?

If the product is around crowd-sourced reviews, thinking about how users might interact with other users or non-users in terms of contributing a review. If it’s a financial software, would gamification of financing make a better experience than just digits and tables. Would users love to compete or collaborate with each other in the game to achieve financial goals ?

From a constructivist’s perspective, our whole world is built into a social context, the human experience as well. Although I brought up Symbolic interaction as a design research framework in this talk, but I’d rather it not be a fixed design model like you have to be divergent in this step and convergent in the next step. It just made the creative thinking another rigid procedure we have to follow.

Symbolic interaction helps us to look into people’s social stories. I wish it to be a mindset, or a habit of thinking for design research. The notion of it should be like a clock reminds us the time but we don’t need to keep looking at it. And that’s already good enough.

Thanks.