Design Considerations for Social Media Platforms

Hello Readers!

We are going to present you below research paper and technical paper which focuses on the interaction design patterns for social media platforms

Research Paper: Co-designing a social media service for civic participation - critical issues and challenges

Nowadays, social media plays a vital role in social issues and problems. It intended to express the multicultural environmental aspects, perceptions and issues. Though it is a good approach, in which we can interact all over the world. But, if we go through it to deeper and deeper, we can see some gaps between civic peoples (i.e., interaction between local communities).   

This paper defines the critical issues and challenges in co-designing a social media services for civic participants and gave the suggestions on how to cope with the challenges in a multicultural participation's. They also help up with the MONIMOS case studies which examine the possibilities of social media in civic participation and collaboration with the public sector.       

In this research, they found some difficulties like 1) inclusiveness - who is allowed to participate 2) stakeholders and representatives - what kind of groups are represented in the process and by whom 3) expertise - who holds the facts and what kind of facts are seen relevant and valuable 4) knowledge and understanding about the process 5) interest or motivation to be involved in the process.

They were found difficulties while engaging participatory design like participation is a deliberative process (public discussion) that should be open and accessible to the public. In urban planning, civic participation is seen to bring value that is unquestionable: it is important to involve citizens in processes that deal with their everyday life and environment. However in the public sector, participatory practices have been found to be still underdeveloped and sometimes problematic: e.g., the process and decision-making are slowed down.

In addition, participatory processes often create conflicts due to clashing interests and values. Another view to participation comes from software engineering. In that context, participatory design refers to software design process, in which the end users participate actively as members of the design team. Participatory design should bring together users and designers, integrate their different knowledge, and provide a common design space for users and designers. When developing social media services, users cannot be viewed only as individuals but also as members of real world and online communities. Likewise, individuals in social media services – as well as in participatory design, are not merely “consumers”, but rather people who are switching between the roles of a consumer and producer.

Previously researcher introduces the four principles of social media based production – prod usage - as:  Open participation, communal evaluation, Fluid hierarchy, ad hoc meritocracy, unfinished artifacts, continuing progress, Common property, individual rewards.

As a result of their research, they highlighting critical factors to take into account executing participatory social media service development processes and also highlight a need for constant meta-level discussion with the users about the ongoing process.              

Attached Document:Co-designing a social media service for civic participation - critical issues and challenges

Technical Report: Social Media and Public Health Research.

This paper is a technical report of the first phase in a new research programme on social media in health and medical science communication, led by professor Thomas Söderqvist, Medical Museion. They also conducted a survey to analyze the social media landscape in the field of public health science.

The first section of the report is to describe different uses of social media for public health science communication with examples of social media platforms.

•  Research dissemination

Sharing links and recommendations to already published articles and contributing new research results to existing or new Wikipedia articles. With links to the original sources, researchers have an opportunity to disseminate their research to other professionals.

• Scientific discussions and networking

Depending on preferences and skills, blogs can be shaped to fit the needs of individual researchers. And users can benefit from the immediate responses from other researchers or public health practitioners.

• Engaging the public

Institutional Facebook pages can be used to share health-related research of relevance to the public, but also to give the public a chance to respond and ask questions.

• Academic teaching

Twitter has been used during lectures for larger groups of people as a way to facilitate discussions and reflection among the students due to its flexibility and diversity.

• Research and data collection

Using social media as a site for data collection may be closely combined with communication of the research, either with the informants or with fellow researchers.

According to the demand for functionality of social media, the design consideration of social media platforms relates to key functionalities of social media, such as openness, flexibility, free, two-way communication, network building, rapid distribution, data-oriented design, interdisciplinary design, and a number of shared characteristics between public health sciences and social media.

Despite several needs of design, there are many weaknesses need to be taken into account, such as lacking of control, opening to misuse, no formalized peer-review, and time consuming.

Attached Doccument:Social Media and Public Health Research