IA Summit 2010: This One Goes to Eleven -- The Best Conversations Happen in the Hall

Much of people’s most valuable communication happens offline. Away from
computers, and often away from mobile phones. These offline interactions have a
huge influence on our online behavior, from the email we send, to the status
updates we decide to keep to ourselves, to the things we decide to buy. To
create great design, we need to understand these offline interactions.

Consider the following stories.

"Reviews from my friends are much more valuable than reviews from people I
don't know. I saw a review for 4 stars from my friend, so I called him and
asked why he didn't give it 5 stars. If the place was terrible, I knew I could
complain to him afterwards."

“My friend Mary texted me to find out if I had checked my Facebook, where she
had sent me a link to a pair of shoes she wanted to buy. I hadn’t checked and
was too busy. But she was in the shop, waiting, and she kept texting me until I
checked Facebook. Lucky for her that I eventually did, the shoes were really
not good on her.”

"Sometimes conversation requires emotion, which text can't really convey. The
phone is more personal. Sometimes you want to share a laugh. That's why it's
more important to me than social networking."

"When I'm organizing my events, I post them on Facebook and then ring people to
drum up support. The personal touch is critical, Facebook and Twitter alone
won't do it."

In the next few years, the most successful social media experiences will be the
ones that understand how our offline and online worlds connect and interact.
But our tools are still crude. Our relationships in real life don’t boil down
to accepting/following/ignoring and blocking others. Adding a 'share this'
button to a product or advertising campaign doesn't make an experience
engaging.

The good news is that despite the complexity involved in understanding human
relationships, we can study offline and online communication, and create design
principles to support what we find. This presentation will speak about things
we have learned from over two years of research into people’s online and
offline relationships, how we gathered data, how we made it actionable, and how
we turned it into design principles that we are using to improve and reinvent
Google's communication products.

The content is aimed at anyone involved in designing for sociability (which is
increasingly becoming most of us). People will walk away with concrete
recommendations for social design.

Attached is a framework we've successfully used to discuss people's real life
social network (referenced here as "The Real Life Social Graph"). Some content
has been blurred for confidentiality reasons. The presentation will walk
through a lot of this framework and talk about how to use it to make design
decisions.