Social media and usability are words rarely expressed in one sentence. Publishing in social media means adherence to a strict corset: the services limit the length of texts, unify the appearance of messages and profiles, and define the interactions enabled around them.

If usability in only seen as a question of easy-to-use and smooth interfaces, the means to make an impact are indeed limited. But considering technical usability along with context of use and individual worth for the user, communication professionals can largely improve the usability of their organisations’ social media channels.

What is happening as we “google” something is essentially that we are telling a huge corporation what is on our mind right now and we trust that this corporation then knows to lead us to exactly what we are looking for. As people become more and more aware that a corporation knowing every one of us so well is not a good thing, the concept of the meta search engine is seeing a renaissance.

For the past year, I have almost exclusively been using alternative search engines. What started out as a self-experiment soon became such routine I almost forgot to write this blog post for my “Own your data” series. Maybe not quite able to compete with the smartest of full-text indexing algorithms, their power resides in the combination of several engine’s results and in the obfuscation of the user’s identity […]

Busy interacting with their media or contacts on the internet, what I call the “digitally blindfolded” barely notice the imminent danger of death as they stumble around on bike paths and between motorized traffic.

The apparent trend towards total extraction from the physical space makes me uncomfortable and I can’t help but wonder what is going on here […]

The short film “Follow Me on Dead Media – Analog Authenticities in Alternative Skateboarding Scene” by Joonas Rokka, Pekka Rousi and Vessi Hämäläinen presents their research on an alternative skateboarding scene in Helsinki. It is a so-called videography – academic ethnographic research using video as a method (for an intro on the academic methodology debate, […]

Creating something that has not existed before is at the core of the activity named “design”. Yet sometimes, not creating something is the best way to create something.

The thought of “undesign” – maybe not using that term in such reflected manner – is nothing new to most designers: a designer given the task to solve a certain challenge might well come to the conclusion that creating something new is not the best solution. […]

As sociologists, we frequently use inequality as a lens to examine various dimensions of social life. A blog post by Jenny L. Davis illustrates how the non-use of technology (in this particular instance, due to lack of access) may not only be a manifestation of the so called “digital divide” – the topic of the […]

With the constantly decreasing threshold to gather, process and store more and more data points, ever more bits and pieces of information are translated into bytes and stored away on the never-ending harddrives of the so called “cloud”. Undeniably, there is great potential in data. However, the question needs to be asked: How much data is too much data?

In the fight to reverse the trend of excessive and uncontrolled storage of personal data and to put its human owners into focus through distributed solutions, a discussion on “data obesity” and approaches like MAD should be part of any design process involving user data. […]

The impact of social technology’s non-use on its users is sometimes abstract to explain. But every now and then, the issue surfaces in very accessible manner as in an editorial piece by Radhika Sanghani on the Telegraph. While active social media users, through constant sharing of detailed accounts from their lives, can cause their friends […]

Back in November, Nathan Jurgenson, the scholar who earlier coined the term “digital dualism” to describe (and challenge) the belief that online and offline lifes are separate entities, wrote an article on The New Inquiry titled “The disconnectionists”. The essay examines the philosophy of people promoting the benefit of consciously disconnecting from digital networks for […]

In my January post titled Identity, content, audience and the (independent) web, I described the approach of using a self-owned website as the primary place to publish online content, while sending out (“syndicating”) copies of the content to social platforms. My motive was to reflect on some of the implicit social aspects. In the discussion […]

Along with the purchase of my Android phone came the convenience of a free and easy cloud back-up of my phone contacts and seamless synchronization with Google Calendar. However, I have since become more wary about whom I want to share my data with.

I decided that it was time to say goodbye to Google and try out ownCloud, the open source software package for hosting one’s own cloud services. […]

My previous post on Privacy-Aware Design (“Replacing Google Analytics with a decentralized alternative”) discussed the inherent privacy issue when a private corporation is able to track users around a large part of the internet.

I presented how the provision of a free service with undeniable benefits for website owners has led to a situation where Google is able to track any internet user around half of the web and that it happens without explicit consent of the end-users (who may only protect themselves from being tracked by browser privacy add-ons).

Following the same train of thought, the next topic in this series are social media integration practices. […]

In late 2005, Google started to provide free access to a web analytics product based on the previously expensive Urchin software suite. In the seven years since, this strategy succeeded to get Google Analytics tracking code included in a stunning share of websites by providing access to a powerful tool at (seemingly) no cost for everyone from big corporations to hobbyist bloggers.

“Oh, and we’ll of course add Google Analytics to the site” is a common phrase in the context of a web project, by large agencies and teenage family webmasters alike: Google has managed to define their product as an implicit standard for visitor analysis on the web. Adding the tracking code is easy and the data the service provides is of unquestionable quality.

Yet, privacy advocates have long pointed out the serious implications of one corporation being able to track users around such a massive slice of the internet […]

While browsing around the internet, data is not only transferred from web servers to our screens, but also in the other direction: mostly invisible to the user, code embedded in websites sends usage data back to the provider of the website and to third-party services.

Working with websites, their design and technical infrastructure on a daily basis, I have always been aware of this. Regardless, the scale of this practice makes me shudder every time I activate the Mozilla Lightbeam plugin (formerly known as Collusion) that visualizes all the tracking providers outside of visited web services […]

On January 28, Data Privacy Day encouraged everyone to make protecting privacy and data a greater priority; a good trigger to start a long-planned series on some things I have been working on over the last year.

With “Privacy-Aware Design”, I aim to create a discussion around privacy as encountered by interaction designers on the UI/UX level.

I consider it important to acknowledge that the protection of users’ information is not just rooted in the service concept (data collection, sharing, visibility) or purely an engineering challenge in the background (encryption, access control, data storage in general), but that privacy is also deeply affected by design decisions on the user-facing interfaces of internet services. […]

My text on “fixing the internet” from two weeks ago triggered an inspiring online discussion with Michael Dlugosch, through which kind of a working hypothesis has started to emerge for me. In a first attempt to paraphrase:

The question of how to create/restore a more open web providing control over one’s own representation hovers around three core issues: identity, content, and audience. It needs to be considered how an independent identity is being established, how users control their content and how they can build and cater to an audience despite independent ownership of identities and full control over content.

Not quite coincidentally, the discussion has touch points with debates going on in many places. […]

The archives reveal it was October 2005 when I started to use Delicious to collect my bookmarks, at a time where I had to use various computers daily.

Four years later, competitor Ma.gnolia lost all user data, marking the first occasion that I (along with a shaken community of their users) questioned the value of cloud services for storing personal data. Yet, both for lack of alternatives and for being lazy, I kept using Delicious – though making regular backups a habit.

Today, we live 2014 and it is time to move on; more specifically, time to reclaim ownership over my bookmarks and to host them myself. Naturally, having grown used to a cloud service, a suitable web-based replacement had to be found. […]

Within the last year, and increasingly during recent weeks, a recurring theme in writings from web design commentators has been that the web is in an unhealthy state and needs some care.

Maybe most prominently, Anil Dash’s “The web we lost” from November 2012 is a wake-up call to everybody working with the web to recall where it originally came from and the opportunities it provided.

More recently, Jeremy Keith has summarised the debate in his article “In dependence”. […]

A patent document was published by the US Patent and Trademark Office on November 19, describing a system developed at Google that analyses a user’s accounts on social network sites in order to provide half-automated reactions to relevant activity within these. From the patent description: There is no requirement for the user to set reminders […]

A few days ago, I noticed an interesting item on my LinkedIn feed that serves to illustrate one of the instances how non-use may manifest itself in social web services. A message featured in the news feed encouraged me (and likely a large number of others) to congratulate a former colleague for her 5 year […]

“Leave your phone behind”, a recent writing by a NYC startup CEO on LinkedIn gained quite a bit of traffic and comments when Rafat Ali suggested to create short periods of disconnection from the omnipresent network and its distracting forces. Both in the article and the 100+ comments by the readers, there is a sense […]

A paper titled “Limiting, Leaving, and (re)Lapsing: an Exploration of Facebook Non-Use Practices and Experiences” by Eric P.S. Baumer et al., presented in May at CHI 2013 (slides), sheds some light on the practices of Facebook non-use and people’s experiences with them. While the presented numbers on the prevalence of Facebook non-use are knowingly not […]

About 10 years ago, technology researchers started to discuss voluntary non-use in contrast to the prevailing assumption that non-use is an involuntary state. In their 2002 book chapter “They came, they surfed, they went back to the beach: Conceptualizing use and non-use of the internet”, Sally Wyatt, Graham Thomas and Tiziana Terranova suggest a “taxonomy […]

The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project published some interesting non-use related numbers related to Facebook, in a report titled “Coming and Going on Facebook”: 61% of current Facebook users say that at one time or another in the past they have voluntarily taken a break from using Facebook for a period of […]

Earlier this year, some media outlets pinpointed that the Facebook user statistics published by social media analytics platform Socialbakers would indicate a decrease in the absolute number of “Monthly active Facebook users” over the last six months in the US, Indonesia and the UK. Even though the data indicated growth to continue at even two-digit […]

Looking at the trace of “non-users” in the history of technology research, the work of James E. Katz and Ronald E. Rice is not to be missed. In their 2002 book “Social consequences of Internet use: access, involvement, and interaction” , they describe a research project which – as an unexpected side product – brought forth […]

Greger, S., Hatami, Z. (2013). Reducing social distance through co-design. In: Keinonen, T., Vaajakallio, K., Honkonen, J. (eds.) Designing for wellbeing. Aalto University Publication Series, Art+Design+Architecture 5/2013, Helsinki, Finland.

Public healthcare in Finland is based on the provision of tax-funded services, which, in times of limited public finances and an ageing population, translates into a demand that often exceeds available resources. Since municipalities are legally obliged to provide their services equally within binding time frames and at a predefined level of quality, there is a strong demand for solutions that will help cut costs, optimise the utilisation of available resources and save on expensive treatments through preventive care.

The book “Designing for Wellbeing”, published by Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture, summarizes a broad range of design projects carried out during the World Design Capital year in Helsinki 2012. In the chapter “Reducing social distance through co-design”, Zagros Hatami and I share our observations from our involvement in three co-design projects related to the provision of better public health care by means of information technology.

The IxDA Helsinki October meeting was an evening filled with discussions about the current state of interaction design, the industry and new ideas. Paavo Westerberg rocked the house with an insightful and lively presentation about 15 Golden Rules for creative processes and event host Idean shared some impressions by their US-based staff in a video […]

“Press ‘Like’ and win an iPad”. “Share your workouts with your friends”. “Complete your profile to tell more about yourself”. Digital services bubble over with calls for users to share more about themselves, about products and people they like as well as about their digital traces from software tools or web services. The primary motivation […]

Do you remember the times before mobile phones and the internet? The most instant technology for distance communication was the land-line telephone: Devices were spread out around the country, connected by wires, and a voice connection could be established between them by entering a numerical code. Yet, this simple technology allowed for a stunningly rich […]

Always interested in discovering new motives for non-standard forms of technology use (or its non-use), I recently ran into an interesting argumentation that online communication may be harmful to the environment due to its use of electricity. It all started when a friend of mine posted an update on Facebook, announcing that she would “take […]

Ever since I first read the publication on the 2010 study of communication technology use by Finland’s official statistics service (Tilastokeskus), I thought it would be great to visualise some of the data contained. In particular, I wanted to dissect the “official” numbers on the use of SNSs in Finland and put them into context […]

Greger, S. (2010). The Absent Peer – Non-users in Social Interaction Design (Master’s thesis). Aalto University, School of Art and Design, Helsinki, Finland.

“Best HCI-related MA thesis” award in the 2011 SIGCHI Finland thesis competition

This research aims to provide a framework for the consideration of non-users in the context of social interaction design (SxD), in particular for the design of social network sites (SNSs).

The theory of “The Absent Peer” consists of two core concepts, presenting the network aspect and the sociality aspect how non-use influences SNS concepts. Herein, the focus of the work is on the discovery of the impact of non-use rather than on its reasons.

Building on the insights from the study, this report presents the conceptual considerations for the creation of valuable SNS concepts that acknowledge non-use as a permanent and complex phenomenon of social reality. The work is based on the sociological perspective of symbolic interactionism. Social interaction design is presented as a practice within the discipline of interaction design, with its goals defined through a discussion on user value and worth-centred design.

The release of Eric Butler’s Firesheep, a browser add-on allowing to hijack browser sessions over unsecured wireless networks without any technical expertise, has triggered a flood of commentary how users may protect themselves. However, while protecting their own connection makes a user safe from having their account hijacked, this leaves the core issue unsolved: As […]

When ISDT09 ended with a farewell dinner at a Porto wine cave on Friday, July 24, everybody I talked to had similar feelings – the school had been a highly inspiring event, connecting many people from all over the world and raising questions that for sure have been further discussed and advanced between the participants since then. In other words, both organizers and participants agreed the summer school was a big success.

Greger, S. (2003). Logout is not an option. Normative and rational aspects of availablility in the mobile phone society (Master’s thesis). University of Tampere, Finland.

The penetration of mobile phones among young adults in Finland is close to 100%. Nearly everybody is permanently connected to a huge network of computer-mediated communication. This thesis is a phenomenologically based case study about normative and rational behaviour of mobile phone users concerning availability and network connectivity.

The role of the mobile phone in society is described from a micro-sociological perspective. With a special focus on related aspects of interaction theory, society is presented as a network of interactions that is being enhanced through the mobile phone, consequently leading towards an “online society”. In this work, social norms are explained to be the regulating element of conduct. They are internalised and considered part of the rational orientation that the rational choice theory defines as the decisive element of individual behaviour.

Qualitative interviews with nine students between 21 and 24 years of age investigate the reasons and patterns of behaviour for remaining permanently connected to the mobile phone network. The method applied is a derived form of focussed interviews.