Last night, Northern User Experience met in Manchester. About 20 people showed up, so it was great to see so much interest. There were two talks:

Does Technology Make any Difference in our Social Life

This talk by Alistair Sutcliffe was about research being carried out at Manchester University about Dunbar’s number and it’s relation with social networks. Robin Dunbar established that through evolutionary psychology, the human brain can only manage 150 active relationships. So what does that imply when people have more than 150 friends on facebook? Alistair suggested that beyond the 150, facebook is just being used as an electronic address book. He also suggested that some faux pas on facebook are caused by people communicating as if there was a room with a small number of friends present, when in reality everyone is eavesdropping. He also suggested that people don’t accept friend requests from people they don’t already know, and people only use facebook to connect with existing friends (or acquantainces). He said there may be a longer tail of distant friends and acquantainces. There is also a trend for people creating islands of networks, rather than just having one circle of friends (there’s my facebook circle, my twitter circle, my work circle etc). Oh, and facebook is mostly used for photos!

In essence, our brain can only cope with 150 interpersonal relationships. I’ve sometimes thought I should delete anyone who I haven’t seen in the space of 12 months. That should cut things down pretty drastically!

Exploring Users’ Values, Motivations and Emotions

I really enjoyed this talk by Sarah Thew. She was explaining how questions need to be asked very carefully when carrying out research if we are to accurately find out how they feel. She also said that we cannot assume a label means the same for everyone. For example, people who label themselves as (environmentally) green can have very different beliefs and views, such as on nuclear power.

I have found in usability tests that when getting feedback at the end, the user will often say that the website was easy to use, even if they struggled greatly with the task. I have therefore developed specially crafted questions which allow the user to feel safe to give more honest and useful feedback. It’s great to see a piece of research around this and I look forward to finding out more about it.