Designing for social circles

Jason Richardson, of Leeton Shire Council sent through a link to this presentation by Paul Adams, Senior User Experience Researcher from Google. For many of us, we don't need to do this type of research in our roles or in the projects or tasks that we work on. Yet in these times of the trendy social media bandwagon, and in spite of us not being businesses selling a product, there is a lot out there in this space that we should take heed of to make our services to our constituents useful, safe and dare I say it, pleasurable?

What I really liked about this story of social circles is some of the basic lessons it gives on how people behave online. You may never use this information in your work, but understating some of these concepts a little better will help contextualise and perhaps change your view on how people are using social media these days.