Emerging design patterns: How digital interactions define social ones
Performance, presence, and participation in the age of Tiktok.
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Digital products are nothing but empty shells without the narrative mechanisms surrounding them. We use a range of beloved digital products in our day-to-day lives, and each of them is special for a variety of reasons, but most importantly they are a stage to perform.
Once upon a time on Facebook, we posted photos, and people commented on them and we replied to those comments and reacted to the replies. That’s how we improved our social presence. Being popular on Facebook made us popular at school. Today my professional presence is no different. I post a comment on Teams or Slack, and my colleagues react and reply in gifs. Memes are commonplace at any virtual work event and we are encouraged to keep the comment section of a virtual meeting alive. In many ways, social media prepared us for hybrid work.
For a while now, it’s not just been about content creation any more, it’s also about the community, the claps, and the clapbacks. With the lines between work and home getting increasingly blurred, our professional spaces are now also social spaces, where narratives unfold as we speak. They are open-ended. They are participatory and contain embedded feedback mechanisms. We seek out ways to attach ourselves to those narratives and digital products provide us with numerous interaction patterns to be able to do so. Here I attempt to think through them using 3 P’s: performance, presence, and participation as being the triad model that brings any digital product to life. Successful content creators assess all three aspects, while successful products design for all three…
1. Performance
User-generated content was the hallmark of Web 2.0, but for the most part, we clung on to our real-world metaphors. Content is not only shaped by multiple parties but also unfolds in the public eye, making our digital lives almost performative in nature. The old adage that goes, ‘If you’re not paying for it, you become the product’, can be tweaked here to ‘If you’re not paying for it, you become the show’. As far as the design process goes, gamification concepts like ‘player personas’ are being used more alongside user personas.
So much of our digital activity uses action-based analogies from physical reality — we write on walls, we follow others, we’re posting stories and articles — most things online are to be seen by the public. If you don’t post something, did it even happen? And progressively, if you aren’t posting, do you even exist?
Even at the virtual workplace, the more your name is seen or tagged, the more visibility you have. Your online status is an indication of your activity, and you are expected to be sending messages and emails, especially at odd hours, for others to see that you are not only working, but working extra hours as well. We were publicly tagged on Facebook in 2014 to do the Ice Bucket challenge, and now at work we get publicly tagged to contribute to charity during a Month of Giving.
With short-format video booming over the past few years, performing is even more literal. Internet celebrities use collaborative dance trends to hop onto the algorithm and earn social currency, and Instagram comedians use trending pieces of audio to impersonate and make their own.
Numerous examples come to mind where the medium is the message — the screen itself acts as the framing device for the narrative. Screenshots of chat conversations turned into viral memes, and specifically screenshots of conversations from some dating apps form a specific genre of content for entire Instagram pages. Keeping in mind that such content can come from anywhere, literally any chat conversation can be deemed a public performance. Tutorial videos where the screen is recorded and there is an overlay of ‘a performer’, has always been extremely prevalent among gamers. Movies, TV shows and music videos have even experimented with filming entire episodes via screens, and articles are written centred around text messages.
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With over 7.3 million subscribers, Snapchat puts out something called Phony Texts — stories told through the frame of a text messaging interface. Each story is told from the same immersive point of view, like you are the one typing and expressing yourself. The pace at which the story unfolds is realistic. You have to patiently wait for each button to be tapped and each text message to appear. The familiar iOS interface, text alert and typing sounds makes it believable.
It goes without saying that screens are so ubiquitous in our lives, but screen-based stories are a whole medium of digital performance that we have passively gotten accustomed to. For the most part, we are also subconsciously well aware that we are performing any time we are online.
2. Presence
Digital Presence is highly evolving and is on its way to become even smarter in the Metaverse. Products which consciously design ‘presence’, allow users to express themselves and leave behind breadcrumbs in somewhat natural ways. They are highly linked to what constitutes ‘identity’ or ‘individuality’ online.
So what have we got so far? We have display pictures, avatars, emojis and customised cursors. We have animated interactions in chat apps telling someone else that we are typing, and we have coloured status icons to convey if we are active or available. I can always RSVP to a meeting, to confirm my availability to the host, without having to actually let them know any other way. Products also notify us when another person was present here making changes to a document and we can go back in time to view those changes.
Productivity apps need to indicate a collaborators presence on a document so that everyone is aware that this particular area is being edited and they should probably not edit it at the same time. Spreadsheet apps have coloured borders around cells which user’s are on, with their name or initials. Canvas apps like Figma and Miro actually show each user’s cursor with sophisticated sync mechanisms when you follow another user’s viewport. Pitch takes it one level further by replacing an avatar with a live video along with the cursor.
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Once me and my colleague were on the same Figma file during a call and I started moving my cursor in figure-8's as I was listening to him, the way one paces up and down while talking on the phone. Without requiring any verbal communication, he began mimicking my movement with his cursor and we chuckled as our cursors danced about like synchronised swimmers.
At my workplace, we have parties on FigJam, Figma’s white-boarding tool where everyone’s cursors visibly move around, resembling a digital Marauder’s map. Sometimes the canvas is pre-decorated with nightclub backgrounds, and jpegs of cheese and wine are laid out for us to pick up and move around. An image of a cake is unlocked and spliced into quarters using set operators Union, Intersect and Subtract. We play games, we make spontaneous digital collages, and we insert memes for others to consume. It always intrigues me what new activity emerges once a playground is available, and just how much of our digital behaviour is imitative and implicit.
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The infamous emoji repository is becoming all inclusive, ever expanding. If there isn’t an emoji for something it’s only a matter of time before it gets added. Emojis are used as reactions during meetings and are effectively tracked as success metrics. They are data types on productivity apps — Notion uses emojis as the default title of a page, while spreadsheet apps apply emojis onto boolean values of data through conditional formatting. Emojis convey a range of emotions beyond the simple like and dislike, and it’s exciting to see how they evolve. Realising the value of these visual signifiers, Microsoft recently refreshed over 1800+ emojis, in a fresh 3D rendered and animated visual style.
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There are customisable emojis of course — Bitmoji linked to Snapchat and Memoji to iOS. And in some way, you get to contribute to shaping your digital presence with these customisable avatars — Change their clothes every so often, put them in limited edition sneakers, or send someone a video of your memoji speaking with your voice.
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I absolutely love the keyboards of personalised memoji and bitmoji stickers, and considering how Snapchat actually changes the text inside the stickers when you type something out, they are going to stay generative delighters for a long time to come. Bitmojis also appear on Snapmaps cleverly holding a balloon when its your birthday, or driving a car when you are on the move. What a fun way of repurposing metadata!
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Cameo overlays are a buzzing new digital interaction — We’ve gotten so used to seeing ourselves on screens at work, that products are designing ways of turning ourselves into overlays. Background detection makes it easy to quickly replace a background with another video. As easy as inserting an image onto a canvas, some productivity apps allow you to insert a cameo object, which is essentially a video of yourself talking over a piece of content. No longer do I need a green screen to turn into the weatherman, all I need is a filter! One of my favourite features on Snapchat are the Cameo selfie stickers where your selfie is placed on a series of customised stickers and even uses intelligence to publish entire animated stories and short films of you and your friends every other day.
Among others, avatar NFTs are especially popular, CryptoPunks, Bored Ape, Bunny warriors and so on, indicative of the fact that people like to change their social media profile pictures to reflect their new assets. Social media leverages this aspect of ownership-linked identity, to impact its own product and growth through networking. Moreover, avatar NFTs are easy to spawn a story around, and can be easily rendered as characters in a 3D metaverse.
3. Participation
Participation is how the success of the performance is measured. The algorithms are designed to upsell what it recognises as active hubs of participation — photos which have the most comments, articles which have the most embedded links, people who have the most fan engagement, trends which have the most momentum.
Influencers are well aware that to drive up a piece of content itself, they must include a trigger, something a teeny bit controversial, or post a question as a caption so as to get people to interact and respond to the content.
What on earth is the incentive for a 12 year old who is not a Kardashian to ‘go live’ on Instagram? But interacting with fans is imperative.
Putting up a public status message was maybe the original way of saying to the world “I have interesting thoughts to share”. We did it on MSN Messenger and Blackberry messenger and on Facebook. Then once Twitter built its whole business around the act of “posting a status”, for the past few years we have levelled up to “posting a story” instead.
Snapchats invention, usurped by everyone else from Whatsapp to LinkedIn, the interaction pattern of ‘the Story’ has solidified itself among the most iconic mobile interaction design paradigms — A full screen piece of short-lived content, accessible by clicking on the avatar of a person, navigated through swift and effective taps. Posting a Story indicates that they have participated, and their contribution was made. It’s almost a nervous tick to open Instagram, click on the first story, tap tap, tap-tap-tap-tap-tap, and close the app, often without actually paying attention to the content or who posted it, anxious to get to the end, but much like infinite scroll, designed so that you never actually run out of stories to tap through.
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Once the average user got used to posting stories, the story authoring process now also comes with a whole host of embellishments, mostly catering to viewer feedback mechanisms. Some of these include adding polls, questions, prompts, links and countdowns. One of its recent features “Add yours” allows you to add your story to a public album for others to find under the same category.
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And ‘Finding others’ is the key here — Being able to quickly see what others have done with this filter, with this audio, with this caption, represents an evolved state of searching for cataloged content under a single tag, a feature from Web 1.0 we still value. Pinning an image from anywhere on the internet into Pinterest boards is a task I still do on the daily. It remains an interaction pattern modern users expect — the evolution being to not just consume the content, but to press the call-to-action button “Use Audio” or “Use Effect”, and to participate in the tag.
A.R. filters are fun when they swap your face with an animal, but they get even more engaging when there is a community of people solving the same quiz or competing in the same challenge. Together with trending audio snippets, A.R. filters which prompt you ‘to do something’ elicit the most participation from an audience — tilt your head to pick between two answers, blink to freeze a frame correctly in place, lower your face a certain way to “find your inner model”…
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Content is re-shared and redistributed, especially across multiple platforms — Posts as stories, stories as tweets, tweets as posts. Content is equally driven by those distributed channels — Youtube comments and Twitter polls trigger videos ideas, and a Snapchat q&a is a call and response mechanism in itself. It is these digital interaction mechanisms that enable Hype culture, public responses elicited through social feedback loops and participatory narratives.
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Considering so much of designing technology is about improving its social and cultural theatrics, the vision for a metaverse is not some utopian space that replaces reality, but a vision for a Web with fairer and higher fidelity performances (content creation expedited by mixed reality and safeguarded as NFTs), interconnected presence (portable identities and avatars) and more decentralised participation (community and distributed co-operation mechanisms). It is perhaps these considerations, analogous to any product designer’s existing toolkit — information, interaction and interface, that define a great digital experience today.