Advance Program - Workshop

15. Social Navigation: A Design Approach?

Monday, 08:30 - 17:00

Organizers
Kristina Höök, HUMLE, SICS
Alan Wexelblat, Mainspring, USA
Alan Munro, Napier University, UK

Social navigation has been proposed as a means to help users cope with large information spaces. Making other users' actions visible allows us to take advantage of the work they have done to find their way around and to solve problems. By information space, we mean anything from the interface to a normal application to large hypermedia spaces such as the World Wide Web or virtual reality environments. Users' actions can be made visible in various ways: through direct social navigation (talking to or seeing individual users act), indirect social navigation (seeing the aggregated user behavior as in recommender system advice), or readwear (seeing how an object has been used by other users through its texture).

Social navigation seems to be a natural approach to the design of an information space; yet we still have not seen many practical solutions that allow users to behave socially, interfaces that allow for the accumulation of social trails, or the aggregation of user behaviors. We invite practitioners, designers, and evaluators who are trying to design for social navigation of information spaces to come and discuss problems and practical solutions, and develop ideas and solutions.

When we say useful solutions, we do not necessarily mean that social navigation must contribute to the efficiency of the interface from the user point of view. What is gained by social navigation might not be, and maybe should not be, time and efficiency, but instead it might contribute to other factors. Maybe a better question to ask is how do we know that we have created a good navigational experience? Will it be a matter of more aesthetic or emotional factors, such as feelings of flow or having a delightful experience, as opposed to the efficiency measurements usually taken for the prevailing tool-based usability evaluations?

The workshop will bring together as many varied viewpoints around these ideas as we can find.

Contact
Kristina Höök
HUMLW, SICS, Sweden
Box 1263
S-164 29 Kista, Sweden
Tel: +46 8 6331500
Fax: +46 8 7517230
Email: kia@sics.se