The research problem that I  am interested in exploring is “how social media can be used to effectively build new friendships, strengthen old ones and combat loneliness.” This is a topic of interest to me because I am quite surprised that there are hardly any social media sites that promote the friendship aspect of why you are using a given platform “e.g. facebook, myspace, instagram, twitter”; these platforms have instead become a digest of experiences and shared content. So in an effort to not only contribute a new perspective in the areas of media and human behavior I’d also like to attempt to contribute something to humanity which would be a way to combat loneliness.

Problem Area

Loneliness caused by a lack of social support.

Research Problem

An analysis of how social media can be used to effectively build new friendships, strengthen old ones and combat loneliness.

Sub-problems

How can social media effectively build new friendships?
How can social media strengthen old friendships?
How can social media combat loneliness?

What Am I Going To Do?

Aid people who are battling loneliness by facilitating a way for them to make new friends and form a stronger social support network.

Why Am I Going to Do It?

People who are shy or timid have a difficult time going out into the world to meet new friends and as a result become lonely and tend to use media and social networks as a form of escapism from reality. Without social support networks such as school or work it can be incredibly difficult for this type of person to enrich their lives with new friendships and as a result become trapped up in loneliness and sometimes depression. There needs to be a fun and approachable way to connect people together for social gatherings.

Crowd Sourcing my Research

Now that I have defined 10 Open Questions, which may or may not be answered by the time I complete my thesis, I have made an attempt at crowd sourcing my research by asking the first two questions on Quora. For the first question “What are the open problems in user experience?”, I have received two answers so far the first response stated that:

“An ‘open problem’ is a question without a known solution, and the interesting thing about user experience design is that we don’t have a lot of open problems or questions, it’s that we often have TOO MANY ANSWERS. ”

Unexpected perhaps due to the obviousness of the statement but yes it is true that there are as many answers to a problem that, we the designers, are able to come up with. The author of the comment goes on to cite pixel density, device design and button placement as recurring things which lack a standard solution. Reason being that there is really no standardized method towards approaching design, only best practices, which as the best of us know are meant to be broken because we’re intelligent enough to do so without having a negative impact on the product. Of course most all design firms that I’ve been at or read of have their own internal style guide with which they follow to make these difficult decisions. These internal style guides often match the philosophy and artistic style of the agency that developed it creating a holistic feel among their client projects. A potential thesis project to come from this would be to create a truly Universal style guide for all designers around the world, but I don’t particularly appreciate how arrogant a project like that would make me appear.

The second poster in my answer on Quora states that a problem with user experience is that it’s “constantly associated with design”, of course I don’t really understand the issue with the connection that the author of the comment holds with this matter; he goes on to state:

“But, you can’t design a user’s experience. At least, not in the common sense of the word. I don’t care how skilled you are at skeuomorphic button design, or how you can design a whole web-app without a single box-shadow or gradient. What’s the common phrase, ‘putting lipstick on a pig?’ ”

The author seems to be confusing visual design with the entire discipline of User Experience by constantly citing aesthetic elements which are entirely superficial and only add a small amount of delight to the user since most people would be perfectly happy with gray squares and boxes (pre Windows 98 software design) as long as the app works. Since you absolutely can design a user’s experience through proper research and testing this comment seems more to be taking issue with the overall confusion in regards to the terminology which is a valid concern in regards to this discipline.

In regards to the other question, “Is there an emerging area where there is a lack of UX?” I have received only one response so far but the content of the comment isn’t really notable enough to have a discussion about since it is outside the domain of my interests in regards to developing my MFA Thesis.

Flow Moments

As part of my mini-survey that I conducted on previously existing MFA thesis projects I came across an interesting topic, offline social networks. We have all of these great social networks for sharing photos, chatting with friends and reading news but very few in the realm of sites like Meetup, which encourage offline discussion and interaction. The SVA students project was called Recess which was specifically geared towards getting people to create social networks around the types of sports they liked playing using the app as a platform. This idea really got me thinking because there have been a lot of times in my life where I’ve wanted to go see or do things such as go to concerts or movies but didn’t have anyone to go with and often times I ended up doing these things alone, which really sucks. What if there was an offline social network which bridged the gap between the digital and physical realities that we live in and somehow allowed people to spontaneously connect?

With user experience being a relatively new field of study and only a handful of universities offering instruction within this discipline at a graduate level I decided to do a little digging and see what I could find from my peers at other universities. This survey was conducted to help inform my own thesis as I have been struggling to define a topic within the broad field of User Experience. In order to keep track of the projects that I have found I’ve created a collection of bookmarks on Kippt¹.

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