Sharing a news story usually seems like simply flicking a click of a button, scribbling out a quick thought and going about your merry way.
But news consumers, who once, were only news consumers are now also producers. Beyond the blogger, only recently has design and technology facilitated the tools to empower the lay consumer to interact with content in a creative way. They are now work as editors, writers and broadcasters, in their own social right.
John McCarthy and Peter Wright compose a fantastic book on experience design, Technology as Experience. “Experience is ever present,” they say. “We are always engaged in experience even when we are trying to stand back from it to describe it.” McCarthy and Wright reaffirm how it important it is to think about and the holistic experience of anything when designing, and in this case, sharing a news story.
Browsing through news stories is absolute active participation. Unlike watching news TV or even reading a print publication, the reader has choice more choice between on and off or skim or not skim. In the current content consuming paradigm, beyond a news summary, the reader must actively decide to click, and almost navigate to a new page to get immersed into a story. It takes a significantly greater commitment. The reader then must actively make a judgement, “do I want to consider reading this article?” If yes, they click, if no, they keep skimming headlines and photos.
This is the first step of what I’m referring to as an editing process, where the reader is flexing their judgement skills. Moving forward, they continue to do this when they’ve consumed enough of the article or graphic and decides to share it. Only now, after all of these hurdles, have they come to the act of sharing something. That standing on the assumption that the sharing interface (and logging in process for that matter) is seamlessly easy to understand.
If the article inspires and resonates with the reader, it’s likely it has a high share-ability. That or it speaks to the readers’ audience, the audience that is comprised of their network. Of course, considering, most people don’t think about the Facebook News Feed is developed in such a way that it’s difficult to overshare to your network, according to Aditya Agarwal, Facebook’s Director of Engineering. Though, they are hoping people will learn and stop worrying about overshare.
In Erik Stolterman’s book, Imagination and Communication, he talks about imagination and communication. The reader takes ideas from their minds eye and must make it communicable, he says, which is part of the creative process.
Once the reader has read the article and formed some kind of thought and new meaning, it still exists in their mind, in their imagination. Once they have taken that vision, explored and then written their thoughts, they have led to “new truths” cited to Erik Stolterman. Their new truths, that are “possible to share with other people.”
And beyond all of this, conscious or not, these readers are engaging in civic and cultural participation, which Jean Burgess, author of Vernacular Creativity cites.
Culture is the means by which we, as individual citizens and communities, experience what the world is like, how we fit in it, and importantly, how we relate to others who are different from us at the same time as we seek out opportunities for belonging.
Where participatory media opens up space for us, as ordinary citizens, to speak and represent ourselves and our ways of being in the world, and to encounter difference, then it’s also a space for the everyday practice of cultural citizenship in that context, everyday creativity is civic engagement, in a sense.
It is not even the writing process itself here that is creative and expressive. It is the development of new truths, personal meaning and broadcasting in a cultural context to an audience, especially at such a mass scale, that has never been done before. Participating in every day media, like Burgess says, helps us develop our own identities, how we see ourselves and how we fit into our worlds. All the while we are making judgements about the what the people in our networks share, say do, and don’t do and how they fit into the world. That has always been a part of civic engagement.
When designing a share UI, designers must consider:
- The overall experience from arriving to the article in the first place. How did the reader get here? RSS, Website, another shared link? Think about where they are coming and possibly where they are going afterwards.
- Consider when they are likely going to want to share.
- Design the UI with enough space that supports an emergent writing and editing process, like a resizable window.
- Think of the reader as a media producer. Is your share UI a pop up or modal dialoge? Will they lose everything they wrote if they go to reread a section of text, navigate to a new site to get some information or another link or copy and paste something?
- Reduce the amount of choices they must make. The New York Times does a nice job giving commentary a high position in the visual hierarchy, while still giving their consumer/producers the autonomy to hit recommend without saying a word, which still says something.