Social Platform Experience Design (#SocialPxD)
In 2019, I had wonderful various epistemic activities. I wrote a book for my favorite topic Curation and developed a theory called Curativity Theory. I also created several frameworks for other topics. One of these frameworks is the PxD framework.
PxD stands for Platform Experience Design. In the diagram below, I use social platforms as an example. If we remove “social” from the diagram, I think it works well too. But I want to focus on social platforms first because there is no such framework for this type of platform.
The Creator-Idea Fit
Like many lifelong thinkers, I have many ideas. Every day I get new inspirations by reflecting on some experiences. How do I select one idea from various ideas and push it forward? I simply see myself as a venture capital investor and my ideas as startups.
James Currier (@JamesCurrier), a Managing Partner at NFX, provided a thinking schema called Founder-Market fit. He identified four dimensions that contribute to Founder-Market Fit: Obsession, Founder Story, Personality, and Experience. I think this schema can be applied to Creator-Idea Fit as well.
I really like digital social platforms because they have made a significant impact on my life. I met my wife by joining a local blogger network. I learned knowledge and skills about web technologies and digital business by participating in the early blogosphere. I joined several digital non-profit projects and found my own youth digital communities. Finally, I became a designer and developer of digital products and social platforms.
Social platforms provide me with opportunities for learning and creating. Social platforms allow me to build communities as leverage to unite youth people for learning, creating, and servicing other people. While most people focus on “Social Media as Entertainment”, I prefer on “social platforms as Creative Spaces”. The term Creative Spaces was from The Power of Pull. According to John Hagel, a co-author of The Power of Pull, social platforms can be a push environment or a pull environment. It depends on how you engage with them.
We need to build more pull-based social platforms.
This above commitment guided me to build the Social PxD framework which was a reflecting journey and a learning challenge for me. I think the outcome is worth sharing with platform thinkers, designers, and users.
What’s a Social Platform?
If you read some books about platforms, you probably find there are many definitions of the platform. What’s the difference between a social product and a social platform? Can we say all social platforms are social software?
One of the ideas from John Hagel I really like is his typology of platforms. He pointed out there are three types of platforms in a white paper The power of Platforms. These three common platforms facilitate different objects: transactions, interactions, and mobilization.
1. Aggregation platforms
Facilitate transactions
Connect users to resources
Tend to operate on a hub-and-spoke model
2. Social platforms
Facilitate social interactions
Connect individuals to communities
Tend to foster mesh relationship networks
3. Mobilization platforms
Facilitate mobilization
Move people to act together
Tend to foster longer-term relationships to achieve shared goals
From the perspective of a designer, I consider the category of Social Platforms a little bigger in order to include some examples of Aggregation platforms such as Airbnb and the whole category of Mobilization platforms.
Looking for a new practical framework
Social (web) design is not a new theme. There are several excellent books that cover this topic. For example:
1. Designing for the Social Web (Joshua Porter, 2008)
2. Designing Social Interfaces: Principles, Patterns, and Practices for Improving the User Experience (Christian Crumlish & Erin Malone, 2009/2014)
3. Building Successful Online Communities: Evidence-based Social Design (Robert E. Kraut & Paul Resnick, 2011/2016)
4. The Art of Community: Building The New Age Of Participation (Jono Bacon, 2009/2012)
5. Inventing the Medium: Principles of Interaction Design as a Cultural Practice (Janet H. Murray, 2011)
6. Principles of Social Interaction Design (Adrian Chan, 2012)
These books provide different practical frameworks for designers. Though some books were published about 10 years ago, they still stay relevant. To be honest, after connecting these books with the existing landscape of the digital world, I found there is something missing. Thus, I think there is a need to search for a new practical framework.
The new framework should pay attention to the emergent platform phenomenon in recent years. The social web has been dramatically changed from perfect competition to oligopoly. Ten years ago, there were many Web 2.0 products on the market. Today, a few successful large players dominate the industry. In 2015, Anne Helmond coined the term “platform ready” in a paper titled The Platformization of the Web: Making Web Data Platform Ready. Thus, we need a new framework to help founders to understand the complex platform ecology. At least, founders who want to access the social business market, have to ask a painful question: should I work with existing platforms or build my own independent platform?
The new framework should consider the dynamic context of human life in the real world. Digital product development has a strong connection to the HCI (Human-computer interaction) research field. According to Bonnie Nardi, an HCI scholar, “The very emergence of HCI as a field of research should be credited to adopting the information processing psychology perspective on human interaction with technology…Around the late 1980s-early 1990s, when HCI was reinventing itself as a field dealing with ‘human actors’ rather than ‘human factors’, theoretical considerations were also of central importance. The shift from the ‘first wave HCI’ to the ‘second wave HCI’ was motivated by the need to overcome the limitations of information processing psychology as a theoretical foundation for HCI.” In other words, we need to add insights from cultural psychology, ecological psychology, and practice theory into the new framework.
The new framework should embrace more than one perspective. Abraham H. Maslow once said in his book Toward a Psychology of Being: I suppose it is tempting if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. Each practical framework is a tool for thinking and reflecting. A single perspective framework is simple, but it reduces the real world to one dimension. In contrast, a multi-perspectives framework is not easy to understand, but it is worth taking this learning challenge.
A Curativity approach: framework as container
As mentioned earlier, I wrote a book titled Curativity last year. I have been working in the curation field for over ten years. I was the Chief Information Architect of BagTheWeb.com which was an early tool for content curation (We launched the site in 2010). This experience inspired me to make a long-term commitment to the Curation theme. After having 10 years of various curation-related practical work experience and theory learning, I coined a term named Curativity and developed Curativity Theory which became a book.
The core idea of Curativity Theory is very simple: In order to effectively curate pieces into a meaningful whole, we need Container as part to contain pieces and shape them. The theory built a brand new ontology called “Whole, Piece and Part” and adopted James Gibson’s “Affordance”, George Lakoff’s “Container” and Donald Schön’s “Reflection” as epistemological tools. To test the theory, I wrote several case studies, and one of them is titled Knowledge Curation.
From the perspective of Curativity, I called the knowledge-building activity as Knowledge Curation. The Pieces are ideas, resources, references, and other materials. The Part is Container that can be a theory, a framework, a model, a book, a set of cards, even a tweet. The Whole is new knowledge in general.
Founder and creators should eat their own dog food. Thus, I applied the Knowledge Curation idea to the task of developing a new framework for social platform experience design. If we see a framework as a container, it becomes an open and dynamic creative stage. We can invite other related theories and frameworks into the stage as guests and actors to play a wonderful show.
A brand new framework
The outcome is the PxD framework which incorporates four perspectives:
Digital Technology Perspective
Interaction Design Perspective
Business Ecology Perspective
Social Practice Perspective
The Digital Technology Perspective sees social platforms through the lens of social software. This is the original source of social (web) design. To respect and refresh this tradition, we need to combine digital technology knowledge and social theory knowledge together.
The Interaction Design Perspective links to HCI academic community and professional practitioners who work in the field. The challenge of this perspective is curating theoretical knowledge and practical knowledge. We need more dialogue between the two camps.
The Business Ecology Perspective combines market-scale thinking and organization-scale thinking. There are lots of business management books which are talking about related issues. A knowledge resource that is rarely known by people is Organizational Ecology developed by Michael T. Hannan and John Freeman.
The Social Practice Perspective follows the track of the practice turn in contemporary theory. Since 2001, a group of philosophers, sociologists, and scientists have rediscovered the practice perspective and used it as a lens to explore and examine the role of practices in human activity. What we need to do is to place Social Platforms within this context.
Unfortunately, the below diagram doesn’t fully describe the whole framework. In order to avoid the “curse of diagrams”, I have to point out that there are two ways to understand this framework: the zoom-in approach and the zoom-out approach.
Zoom in: a lifecycle view
The zoom-in approach is also a lifecycle view. This view focuses on one particular social platform with a process perspective.
The lifecycle view suggests that everything will transform from one stage to the next stage. For social platforms, I suggest the following four stages:
1. Social Practice Stage
2. Social Software Stage
3. Social Product Stage
4. Social Platform Stage
The Social Practice Stage is a pre-product stage. At this stage, founders get insights from thinking or reflecting on existing social practices and generate ideas for making an innovative social product. The planned product will service existing social practices in a better way than existing products. Or, the planned product could generate a possible practice that will lead to a small step of cultural innovation. For example, sending a greeting card to a friend is an existing social practice, so we see eCard or online greeting card service providers did a great digitalization job.
As we know, Blogging has already become an existing social practice, but creative narrative between family members is not a normal social practice. StoryWorth made it real. Once a week, StoryWorth emails your family members questions you’ve never thought to ask. Then, they reply with a story, which is shared with you each week. At the end of a year, their stories are bound into a beautiful keepsake book.
The Social Software Stage is a pure-product stage. At this stage, founders turn their ideas into real products with tons of work on development and design. As pure-product, social software only requires available functions and an acceptable interface. Developers don’t need to consider marketing, branding, and business models at this stage. Some developers even release their social software to the public market with an open-source license. The early social software such as Forum, Blog, and Wiki have many open-source licensed products.
One of the most popular blogging software is WordPress which was developed by Matt Mullenweg and was released on May 27, 2003. Today, the open-source licensed WordPress software is part of WordPress Foundation which hosts the Wordpress.org site where people can download the code and install it on their own servers.
The Social Product Stage is a real-product stage. At this stage, founders turn their social software into a business with a sustainable business model and numerous satisfied users by investing in marketing and branding. All non-open-source licensed social software needs to upgrade to this stage, but most of them fail on finding a business model or acquiring enough users to support the business model. The digital business is a dynamic and intensely competitive market, most social products fail on competition.
In 2007, Kevin Rose launched a product called Pownce which was a social networking and micro-blogging site. At that time, Twitter had established its micro-blogging leading brand in the blogosphere market. Pownce failed on competing with Twitter.
The Social Platform Stage is a post-product stage. Once a social product won a war in a new category, its founder can continue to push it to the next stage. The social product will eventually reach the mass market, gain a huge amount of users and dominate a particular domain. At this stage, the Social Platform becomes a new infrastructure that enables third-party developers to run apps or services. Thus, the founder needs to pay attention to the management and governance of the social platform.
Today, we live in the age of the platform. In 2011, Google’s Eric Schmidt named four companies that stood apart from the crowd: Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google. He called them the Gang of Four. Since then, many books started talking about this issue. For example, The Age of The Platform (Phil Simon, 2011), The Four (Scott Gallway, 2017), Human Rights in the Age of Platforms (Rikke Frank Jørgensen, 2019). The description of The Four says, “Whether you want to compete with them, do business with them, or simply live in the world they dominate, you need to understand the Four.”
Zoom out: an ecology view
The zoom-out approach can be called an ecology view too. This view focuses on the landscape at one particular time from an ecology perspective.
The ecology view focuses on the “organism—environment” relationship. It suggests each and every living organism has its specific surrounding medium of environment called niche. An organism is also part of other organisms’ environment.
For the PxD framework, I consider five components: People, Practice, Software, Product, and Platform. Each component can be considered as Organism and Environment as well. Let’s use O to represent Organism and E to represent Environment. Now, we can generate the following O-E relationships.
People (O) — Platform (E)
People (O) — Product (E)
People (O) — Software (E)
People (O) — Practice (E)
People (O) — People (E)
Practice (O) — Platform (E)
Practice (O) — Product (E)
Practice (O) — Software (E)
Practice (O) — Practice (E)
Practice (O) — People (E)
Software (O) — Platform (E)
Software (O) — Product (E)
Software (O) — Software (E)
Software (O) — Practice (E)
Software (O) — People (E)
Product (O) — Platform (E)
Product (O) — Product (E)
Product (O) — Software (E)
Product (O) — Practice (E)
Product (O) — People (E)
Platform (O) — Platform (E)
Platform (O) — Product (E)
Platform (O) — Software (E)
Platform (O) — Practice (E)
Platform (O) — People (E)
In order to understand these 25 types of O-E relationships, we can apply some ecological theoretical ideas for further discussion. For example, the Affordance Theory is very useful for thinking about the “People (O) — Software (E)” relationship. For talking about the “Product (O) — Platform (E)” relationship, my own idea of Curativity Theory is relevant.
As an introduction, this post can’t go deep into the ecology view. We can explore it later together.
Platform for Development
(This section is added on Dec 13, 2020)
During the past several months, I developed a framework called Platform for Development (P4D). The P4D framework is a platform-based project-oriented activity-theoretical approach. The core of the framework is Platform[Project(People)] which defines a nested social structure for understanding the transformation of individuals and society.
The framework presents a systematic model of Platform[Project(People)] with three innovative concepts: “Supportance”, “Themes of Practice”, and “Identity in Practice”.
The major theoretical resources behind the framework are Activity Theory (the project-oriented approach, Andy Blunden, 2014), Social Domains Theory (Derek Layder, 1997), Ecological Psychology (James Gibson, 1979), and Self-Determination Theory (Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, 1971, 2017). I was also inspired by Knud Illeris’ How We Learn (2007) and John Hagel’s The Power of Platform (2015).
The P4D framework is expected to apply to various domains such as Startup Ecosystems, Open Brand Programs, Community Engagement, Theoretical Traditions, Knowledge Platforms, etc.
Check out the following link to see the article which presents details of the P4D framework.
The Supportive Cycle
(This section is added on Feb 9, 2021)
The Supportive Cycle is a model for the Platform for Development (P4D) framework. The model is based on a concept called Supportance.
The Platform-for-Development (P4D) framework starts from a unique theoretical assumption that the ideal unit of analysis for studying adult development in the age of a platform is a nested social structure: Platform[Project(People)].
In order to understand the relationship between Platform and Project, I develop the Supportive Cycle model which considers four types of entities and four movements of their interactions.
The four types of entities are Platform, People, Project, and Platformba. The four movements are labeled as 1, 2, 3, and 4 on the diagram. However, these numbers don’t refer to steps or stages. I consider these interactions are parallel development.
The Supportive Movement is defined by the concept of Supportance which refers to the potential supportive possibilities for actions. Each movement is divided into two states: the Potential status and the Actual status. The relationship between two entities is roughly considered as “environment” and “organism” from the ecological perspective. One side (as the “environment”) offers Supportances to the other side (as the “organism”).
Check out the following link to see the article which presents details of the Supportive Cycle.
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