Case study: How we can design more intimate interactions for social media

I have been a member of Facebook since 2009, yet my wall only has a handful of posts. The occasional life update, or profile picture upload, in the past decade of being a Facebook user, I have only posted about once or twice a year.

And here’s why: I don’t like how superficial social media has become. Take for example my current Instagram page:

Wow I need to start being more active on social media

The posts are mainly a couple of milestones: getting into my CS master’s program, studying abroad, playing at Coachella, being invited to Adobe’s conference as a student VIP.

But none of this tells anyone about who I am or what my life philosophies are. Instead, it just exacerbates the current status quo in social media of superficiality (not sure if this is the best phrasing but you get the gist of what I mean). So, I decided I wanted to see how I can change that.

My first thought was a Finsta.

A finsta is a secondary, usually private, Instagram account where users are more lax in deciding what they post. It’s a private space that might be more personally authentic and is shared with close friends. This is a contrast to someone’s main account, which might have more heavily curated content.

— Dictionary.com

However, I wanted to make a more intimate, more human form of social media. One that doesn’t just involve me solely posting scandalous pictures, but my own internal musings. I wanted a place where my friends could post on my page, and where I could foster genuine discussions between all my closest friends.

So I decided to create a Facebook Finsta.

My Facebook Finsta

The benefit of a Facebook Finsta, unlike an actual Finsta, is that you can post text blurbs, discussion topics, personal stories, and so much more. And while you can already do that on Facebook as is, why don’t people do it more? I think it wraps back around to the superficiality of social media — people are so obsessed with getting the most amount of friends and likes and reactions that they tunnel vision on those quantitative measures. But the qualitative measures you can’t see: how your posts make others feel, how your posts make yourself feel, and how your posts strengthen your bonds with your friends. These qualitative measures are so often ignored, and at its root is what makes social media so enticing. At least to me.

Furthermore, I wanted to have a platform that not only documents my life well but also documents my friend’s lives and how they have impacted myself. If I post an Eliot story, I can get the POV of one of my friends that was there. Then I can get the reactions from another friend halfway across the world and begin having tighter bonds with friends I hadn’t talked to in years.

Example post on my FFacebook:

Example post on my Facebook Finsta

Notice that there are no metrics to measure how ‘successful’ this post was. Sure you can look at how many likes there are but what I find more meaningful are the conversations that you can spin off of a post.

Some comments from this discussion

I would never have these kinds of conversations on a wall on my actual Facebook because there are around 400 people on there and I would be afraid of them judging my discussions. So instead I would resort to just texting individuals or group chats. I’d instead actually end up having the exact conversation with multiple friends with the exact same talking points. This sort of FFacebook helps alleviate a bit of that by allowing anyone to hop in on the conversation.

Furthermore, this allows our discussions to be easy to start up again from where we left off. Often I find that the discussions I have in group chats to be tough to follow because if I leave for 5 miniutes the discussion topic may have completely changed to a different topic. With this stlye of social media, that’s almost completely alleviated.

Example post on my Facebook:

On the flip side here is a post on my actual Facebook account.

Example post of my actual Facebook page

While I post infrequently, I still want to keep my friends in the loop of what’s going on in my life. But because of how many people are on my Facebook I don’t feel comfortable diving into a discussion about it.

For example, when I got into grad school I had many different thoughts. I wanted to see if I should go get a Ph.D. at a different school, or should I stay USC? Should I go into industry or go into academia? But instead the conversations I had went more along the lines of this:

Very surface level bonding

A nice gesture by my friends for sure, but because of my own inaction, I wasn’t able to discuss my actual internal thoughts and get the opinions of my closest friends.

Closing Thoughts

Now I know this isn’t a traditional design challenge, but I do think it conveys my design thinking effectively. While this post is relatively short and doesn’t include any mockups, I believe this to be a user experience redesign. After all, being able to spin a new user experience based off of an existing platform I think is something that I believe can really show off one’s design skills.

I would love to be able to explore this field — a social media platform that has more of the human element involved. I think this type of platform would work best at Facebook, potentially as an extension of their current platform.

This, in essence, is really no different than a blog, except it will have more bite-sized, digestible musings (and the occasional meme). So far, as of September 23rd, 2 days into starting this project I’ve suddenly started using social media for what I believe to be its intended use — to connect people and strengthen their relationships. In these past 48 hours, I have had many old friends reach back out, and many current relationships open up to having more meaningful conversations.

I think I will work on a prototype for what I believe this type of platform should look like in terms of UI/UX because I don’t think my current methodology on Facebook is the final form of this type of platform.

I think I would want to add categories to sort thoughts by; categories that are defined by the user. For example, my posts have had the following categories:

1. Memes
2. Project Idea
3. Discussion
4. Cool stuff I’ve been reading/watching/listening/eating/exploring

Then users can sort by their own defined categories and follow the conversations that way.

I think the idea itself still needs a lot of refining to do, but this is the first project I’ve felt genuinely excited for in a very long time.

If any readers have any suggestions or ideas as to how to approach this type of platform I would love to hear your thoughts!

You can reach me at eliot.chang@usc.edu