Social User Interface (SUIT): is the Enterprise 2.0 emperor naked?

A lot has been written about why Enterprise 2.0 projects fail (the latest I’ve read: 14 Reasons Why Enterprise 2.0 Projects Fail).

Most of the articles I’ve read seem to ignore one point that I think is critical. In this post I will attempt to highlight that point.

In a previous incarnation with an international non-profit research organization, I piloted and implemented a “rogue” internal social networking application. It had to be rogue for the usual reasons (initial apathy from colleagues, hostility from IT types, zero resource-allocation, among others).

How hard is it to be social?

The biggest predictor of success, from my experience, was how well the application made it easy to be social. You’d be surprised that a vast majority of enterprise 2.0 applications make it quite difficult to be social in the way users already are. No wonder a lot of (re)training is required. No wonder user uptake is slow, if at all it takes off.

Instead of leveraging what should be the greatest asset out there, namely that humans already are incredibly social and want to further their social circles, most “social applications” toss out ways that work in the analog “real world” and try to digitally recreate unfamiliar ways of being.

Consider the following all-too-common mind-bending scenarios:

• File-centric social applications:  I don’t know anyone who voluntarily shares files with colleagues just for the sake of sharing the file. People share information, seek comments, show-off their knowledge etc. Sharing the file is a means, not an end in itself. It still reeks of file-ism even after you add a few social widgets and re-brand.

• The requirement for voodoo markup in some wiki applications: who wants to do that when there are other, albeit non-social, ways that have the added benefit of WYSIWYG editors?

• The expectation that browsing to a website will be the primary interface for interaction with the application: what ever happened to email/IM integration? I purposefully only include email and IM as they already are accepted as legitimate in most enterprises (email more so than IM).

• Context-aware search: it isn’t enough that search is content-aware. If users are to meaningfully engage with the torrent of generated information, context-aware search engines should display relevant information without the user necessarily searching for it. This is important as one cannot possibly search for information they are not aware exists!

Social like I already am

Despite a deep desire both philosophically and practically to go the open-source route, I finally had to make do with a quasi-open platform (Clearspace from Jive Software, now confusingly re-branded Jive Social Business Software) principally because Clearspace made it easy to be social in a way that users already were.

This was pleasantly borne out when users, some with little training but most with no training, took to the platform with surprising gusto. Infact, some users developed such a personal affinity for the platform that they considered it “our space and HR shouldn’t mess with it”.

The sum total of tools that a user is expected to use in order to engage socially is what I’d call a Social User Interface (SUIT). The net-effect of a conscious design decision to engage users in a socially intuitive manner, both at the visible and invisible level, is what makes for a well-designed Social User Interface (SUIT). On this metric, a good number of enterprise 2.0 applications need some dressing-up.

How one application suits up

Here’s how Clearspace won me over:

• People, and the resulting conversations, were at the center of Clearspace’s implementation. Users “got it” after a short period of using it. More “complex options” like tag-clouds often only required quick explanations.

• The wiki app wasn’t even called a wiki, and most definitely did not look like one, even though it was one. Expanding/restricting allowed editors, and commentors, was such a breeze.

• A really neat feature is tight email integration where one can start/continue conversations, and create new content, from email. This allowed people who loathed visiting another website to be part of the community, right from within their email application. With time, some of these same people saw the added value of regularly directly interacting with the web application, because it was worth their time. IM integration was achieved via Openfire, open-sourced by Jive and which has very tight integration with Clearspace. This provided another avenue for people to be part of the community, with the exact same permissions, from their IM clients.

• Clearspace has a great “more like this” widget that displayed people/content that is deemed similar enough to what you are currently interacting with. The search engine behind this is the venerable open-source Apache Lucene.
  • This is one area that is painfully lacking in Elgg, a promising and open-source “social engine” (I’m currently working on a Lucene plugin for Elgg).
  • A “semantic search engine”, for instance OpenCalais, might even work better (I’m also working on an experimental plugin for Clearspace and Elgg).

Better filters, and the “Trust Spectrum”

There is definitely room for improvement in all social platforms/engines/applications that I have come across:

• There is no clear way to quickly determine where the content you are creating will end up in the “trust spectrum” (coined by Gia Lyons: the digital corollary to the observation that we selectively share information in the real world). No application, not even Facebook, has an intuitive and quick indicator of  where, in the trust spectrum, your post will be placed. Remember Twitter’s DM Fail?

• Most social applications use a points system to highlight top/most-helpful/trusted contributers. While a noble attempt at capturing the social nuance that “not all opinions are created equal”, it is not something that comes naturally to most people. What is needed is a better filter, this is what this feature really is, that takes into account how we really determine who to pay attention to in our everyday life. I have some draft ideas on how this may work, perhaps for another post.

What do you think? What has your experience been with regard to Social User Interfaces (SUITs)?

Advertisement