Connecting Anthropology and User Experience
November 8, 2011 Author: Luke Hay
Last week I attended UX Brighton 2011. After the success of their first conference last year the UX Brighton team had a lot to live up to. Fortunately this year’s conference was even bigger and better than UX Brighton 2010. I’ve split my thoughts on the conference into a series of four blog posts starting off with the first talk of the conference by Professor Robin Dunbar on Connecting anthropology and User Experience.
Various studies show that people have a cognitive limit of about 150 when it comes to their relationships with other people. This is the case for the average number of Facebook friends that people have and also for the core size for groups throughout history, including Neolithic farming villages! Adam wrote a post about the ideal community size and Dunbar’s number last week and this talk covered that as well as covering other theories about human behaviour.
Professor Dunbar’s research also looked into how people interact with each other and the effect that technology has had on that. Work was undertaken to see how people evaluate interactions with close friends over different media, comparing face-to-face conversations with ones involving the same individuals over Skype, phone, e-mail, text, and social networks. Face-to-face conversations beat Skype but Skype gave more satisfaction to users than those using the other technologies. The sense of being in the same place seems to make an immense difference that neither phone conversations nor social networks can yet manage. The immediacy of the interaction is part of it, but so too is seeing the other person’s responses to what we say. Laughter turned out to be the key as it releases endorphins in the brain.
Happiness is also contagious, having three ‘happy’ friends generally leads to you being happy. The study below looks at happiness in face-to-face networks blue indicates the least happy and yellow indicates the happiest people, and you can clearly see the ‘happy’ and ‘unhappy’ clusters.
The type of online relationships was analysed too and it was found that people have ‘stable family’ but ‘fragile friends’, with friendship groups changing regularly but family generally staying in contact. Studies also showed a marked difference in how genders communicate, with women forming closer relationships by talking while men generally need to ‘do stuff’ together to form closer bonds. Also, ‘romantic’ relationships generally ‘cost’ people two close friends!
The results of another of his studies showed that people work together it produces better overall results and that working in sync with others improves individual performance too. The 2009 Oxford crew from the boat race were studied to show this. When the rowers were using rowing machines that were linked together as a team they produced better individual results than just rowing on the machines that weren’t linked with their team.
Professor Dunbar concluded his enlightening talk with a warning about how globalisation and the increase of social networking may have an adverse effect on the quality of our communication and interaction. As he said at the start of the talk “The Digital world isn’t the answer to our Nirvana”.
3 Responses to “Connecting Anthropology and User Experience”
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November 9th, 2011 at 5:37 pm
So would a virtual conversation through something like Xbox Kinnect – with virtual avatars talking but people being able to move using their own body movement, slot between Skype video conversations and direct personal ones interms of ‘happiness’?
That would be an interesting study for virtual conferences!
November 10th, 2011 at 1:11 pm
[...] Hay’s notes provide a more extensive overview about Robin’s [...]
November 11th, 2011 at 1:38 pm
[...] Distractions and Designing the Wider Web Cross-channel User Experiences and Domain Driven Design Connecting Anthropology and User Experience Ageism, Measuring the ROI of Design & Games Led Innovation Tags: Brighton, Events, UX, UX [...]