Introducing Sociability: Usability for the Social Web

Great and quick read on Mashable today about social usability and personas. Here's the meat of the article:

In social media, many individual users, each different from the next, combine to form a social experience. Those users will have all manner of motives and interests that don’t necessarily overlap. The degree to which your social media efforts capitalize on these user habits results in sociability, and this starts with taking a user-centric perspective. In fact, you need to take multiple perspectives.

For the purpose of developing these different user perspectives, it is helpful to create user personas to describe the different types of social behavior. I like to group users into self-oriented, other-oriented, and relationally-oriented types.

• Self-oriented users are those who extend their presence online, building audiences and posting content. Experts, pundits, and those sometimes called “creators” are self-oriented users.
• Other-oriented users are those who start with the conversations and contributions of others. Where the self-oriented user talks about him or herself (expresses him or herself), the other-oriented user responds, replies, or comments. What he or she reads and finds interesting provides a springboard for conversation.
• Relationally-oriented users gets involved in social activities. They see what’s going on between other users, and may be drawn to these more social interactions. Involvement puts these users in relation to other users, with all the dramatic and nuanced activity this can result in.

These are extremely oversimplified descriptions, of course, but they’re not meant to describe real individuals. Rather, they’re a heuristic model intended to expand your thinking about your users.