“Hi, I’m Nicholas.”

“Hi, I’m David. Nice to meet you. Didn’t you used to work at eBay?”

This was how my conversation started in a recent meeting and it sparked a lively discussion on the etiquette of social networking in business.

So how do the old rules of business etiquette and codes of behaviour map to our new web2.0 social media reality? Nicholas, in his early thirties, respond quite well to this enquiry and it seemed he found it natural for someone to look him up on LinkedIn prior to a meeting. His colleague Jonathan admitted that he had dropped out of social media by letting his LinkedIn page go and only checked his Facebook every month or so. I suspect that their older colleague might not have found my stalking so flattering.

In this post I discuss my thoughts on the etiquette of social media in business and hope that you will enliven this article with anecdotes of your own.

Making a connection

Do you make contact before or after that important meeting? Do you want to show them that you are taking an interest and trying to understand them or will they take it as presumptuous and creepy? Would James Packer accept my offer to connect without knowing me? LinkedIn has made this more difficult and begun to respond to real-world business etiquette by insisting that if you have no professional connection you must know their email address.

Remember that other people can see who you are connecting to and may make a judgement about the frequency of your connections – this is just like holding a big party and inviting everyone you ever met, it will make your guests feel insignificant.

Things to consider:

• Assess the strength of your connection
• How do you think your contact uses social media? Did you research them?
• Always write a personal message when connecting

Mapping the real world rules to social media

• Spruiking
• Spamming
• Talking trash
• Being overly familiar

Managing your profile

• Keep your  Facebook profile private
• Don’t boast on LinkedIn, you have no control over who sees it
• Keep your profiles up to date

Stalking

When do you look too desperate? Should you tell people that you have ‘Google stalked’ them? Will they take it as someone keenly interested and diligent or will you look like a freak?

Recommendations

Don’t accept a recommendation if you don’t indent to reciprocate.

Only send a request for a recommendation to selected people you have worked closely with, if you send these invitations to everyone at once you risk looking like a salesman.  This often signals an imminent change in employment.

Introductions

http://www.linkedin.com/answers/professional-development/ethics/PRO_PET/247853-93094?searchIdx=0&sik=1266204971392&goback=%2Easr_1_1266204971392

Facebook vs LinkedIn

• Keeping friends and family in facebook, colleagues and business contacts in LinkedIn
• Never feel pressured to accept a Facebook invitation from a business associate, colleague or client. Be up-front about how you use each service: “Sorry, but I just use Facebook for family and old friends – how about we connect on LinkedIn”

Further reading

Forbes.com: Are You Practicing Proper Social Networking Etiquette?

LinkedIn.com: What is the right etiquette for brokering an introduction between two people?

What is research driven design?

• Asking what YOUR users want from YOUR website or application, at THIS point in time, in their context
• Designing a site that makes the user feel it is about them, not about your processes or structure
• Validating that the design resonates with your users
• Part of User Centered Design theory and practice

What is it not?

• Market research
• Statistics
• Surveys
• Feedback
• Usability
• Information Architecture

But it does inform all of these.

Components of research

If you don’t know what you want to achieve, you won’t achieve anything at all

Carefully structure your research

• Scoping and goal setting
• Research design
• Focus groups and/or interviews
• Heuristics
• Design
• Validation

What are we looking for?

• Content – what have you got?
• Context – what does the user feel, know or think?
• Control – how do people use it?
• Result – what does everyone gain?

Content: what does your site do? How are you trying to help the user?

Context: Why are they here? Where are they from? What do they already know about you? How did they get here?

Control: How do people want to use your website? Is it Information or an application. Users will tell you how they want things to behave.

Conclusion:  What does everyone get out of it in the end, do the users know this before starting? What is the value proposition?

Context is everything

• Every group of users is different
• The world changes quickly
• You are not a user
• Usability rules are not black and white

Case studies

• What a client discovers can be more important than what they already know
• What a client does about a discovery is more important than the problem

Who has been served a bad meal in a restaurant? How did they handle it when you complained?

Case study: DCITA website

• Goals
• Process
• Findings
• Results

Much of our time as User Experience or Usability professionals is taken up with battling against the ‘unbelievers’, trying to promote our cause and make the world a more usable place. Sometimes we need to understand that some things are designed to be hard to use on purpose. This post examines the hard-to-use things in everyday life that perhaps should stay that way and encourages you to bring your own examples to our show-and-tell.

Over the coming weeks I will examine a range of topics in more detail such as:

• Security forms – keeping you on your toes.
• Insurance forms for small claims – finding inconsistencies in your story.
• Hospital forms – asking the same thing repeatedly sometimes pays off.
• Online stores that threaten existing channels
  • IKEA - retail experience in-store drives impulse sales, online does not.
  • Shopping mall design increases circulation.
• Harmful things – childsafe products.
• Learner driver tests? Force people to learn difficult things properly.
• System performance – faking slow performance on purpose.
• Reverse gear – protect us from our own stupidity.
• Hidden Treasures – hide-and-seek websites can sometimes be fun.

So, what else should I be looking at?

To begin, I need to thank Theresa Neil and Bill Scott for their fantastic book Designing Web Interfaces. Chapter 2: Drag and Drop has provided much of the background for my current design exercise: to design a drag and drop pattern that spans multiple applications, in multiple windows and has consistent behaviour for lists, objects, modules collections and actions. This exercise has been a real eye-opener, exposing more complexity than I realised. While Theresa and Bill’s book focusses on web interfaces, it provided really useful material when considering rich user interfaces in Silverlight, the tool of choice for my client.

In my current role I’m being tasked with designing a consistent, common user experience across a handful of disparate enterprise applications and software tools. At this point we don’t know what any of them are, what sort of interfaces they will come with or if we will be rebuilding the UIs from scratch, so my crystal ball is getting a good workout.

Drag and Drop is shaping up to be one of the most important ways for users to move information between applications. It works for users because it closely matches their mental model of their work environment: “I want to move/copy this thing from here tothere”. Traditionally integration between systems has been a complicated affair with the integration points and options buried deep in menus and obtuse commands. Many information workers build their own work-arounds using spreadsheets to copy, transform then paste between applications.

States

Surprisingly, I discovered a total of 14 states that should be considered:

• Page load
• Mouse Hover
• Mouse Down
• Drag initiated
• Dragged object leaves its original location
• Drag re-enters its original location
• Drag enters a valid target
• Drag enters a specific invalid target (as opposed to a generally invalid target)
• Drag is over no specific target
• Drag hovers over a specific valid target
• Drag hovers over a specific invalid target
• Drop accepted
• Drop rejected
• Dropping on a parent container

Objects

In the drag and drop behaviour, we have a number of objects, or ‘Actors”:

• Page (or window)
• Cursor
• Tool tip
• Drag object
• Drag object’s original location and parent container
• Drop target and parent container

Because I’m going to be creating many large, dynamic tool tips for all sorts of objects, I’ve elected not to create behaviour for a tooltip in my drag and drop pattern and as our applications are going to be in many separate windows, I need to consider that the ‘page’ object might conceptually span a number of windows.

Interesting Moments

Theresa and Bill discuss ‘Interesting moments’ – a matrix of behaviours for each object in each state. As part of my design process, I sketch my ideas in pencil before firing up Adobe Illustrator or Microsoft Blend. There are four general situations that drag and drop can be applied to that all behave slightly differently: Object, Lists and Grids, Collections, Actions, and Modules.

Objects

In our case, objects are things that can be moved from one place, like a set of search results, to another place, like a form field. Objects don’t always need to be exactly that same format or display in the same way in both places.

Lists and grids

For my project, lists and grids can contain a variety of objects, ranging from simple text lists to hierarchical lists and object grinds with images. Other implementations may include data visualizations with networks like hub and spoke patterns or faceted search interfaces like Microsoft’s Pivot.

Collections

Collections are essentially a way to put a number of objects together. Common examples of this are a shopping cart or a clipboard.

Actions

An action is something that can help interaction between systems, for example, dragging a file from the desktop onto a ‘drop box’ window to upload it.

Modules

A common way to rearrange modules…

When and where should we use drag and drop?

This is one of those typical UX type responses; “It depends”. Here are some things to think about:

• A major limitation is the lack of affordance in any drag and drop interface – the user is not immediately aware of how to perform a function and often the  hints and tips required to help them understand can either be missed or severely clutter the interface.
• Drag and drop can sometimes be more effort for a user than other, simpler methods of performing a task, such as clicking a button or link.
• How much training and guidance will the user receive? In the case of a public-facing website you can safely assume it will be none, but with a specialist enterprise desktop application users may be very well trained.

Rules and behaviors

In line with the theme of minute complexity, I needed to define a bunch of often subtle rules and behaviors.

• Drag and be initiated by:
  • Holding the mouse down and dragging immediately
  • Holding the mouse down for 1 second
• Lists, grid and modules should dynamically rearrange during drag to show the predicted final state of the drag action
• Dragable objects can be constrained by regions, especially important in the case of lists and grids
• Move vs Copy
  • Every object will have a different default
  • Copy will be indicated with a + cursor
  • Move will be indicated with a -> cursor
• Zoomback – failed drag and drop actions will result in the object zooming back to its original location