Writing a “how to” guide for facebook is an interesting topic because it assumes some uniformity in members of that age range. It is common, for example, for my generation’s parents’ to have facebook accounts. There are some folks in the 40-60 age range who are perfectly capable of working with computers, a wide majority who are somewhat familiar with computers, and of course a select group who has little or no computing experience. It seems fair, then, that my target audience will be those who have standard computing knowledge.
To effectively train this group of users, we will need to draw on frames that they are already familiar with. Orlikowski describes as frames like reference points with which we can take existing knowledge and extend it to new technologies. For example, my Grandpa once asked "Will the internet be open Easter Sunday?" In trying to understand the internet, he was working with the frame of a physical store. In terms of facebook, it would be best to break it into multiple frames. The main components to consider are “Friending”, the “wall”, and messaging.
Messaging is an easy feature to explain. I’ll assume that the users are familiar with at least to concept of email. Using email as a frame, we can explain that facebook messaging is similar because only the designated receiver can view the message. To describe the wall we can use several frames. We could at first include a technological frame of a forum. Posts are sequential and viewable by everyone. If the user does not know what a forum is, we could set the frame to be a list on paper written in pen. We can explain that the messages are viewable to everyone.
The frame we can set to portray "friending" is the idea of allowing someone to come into your house. Until you let them in, they don't really know anything about you but your name. Once friended, they will be able to come in and look around and get a feel for who you are. Of course, you can keep them out of certain areas of the house and they will never be able to steal anything. Friending them will simply allow them to look at some of your information, style, etc. The idea is that you will let your friends in your house to talk to you and to see your stuff, but not necessarily strangers.
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You do an excellent job drawing on existing frames of knowledge when describing Facebook’s features. We learned from Orlikowsky that users, especially older users, are somewhat stubborn and may not be able to grasp completely new terminology or ideas, hence your comparison between Facebook and a store is quite helpful. You also draw on other frame works for “friending” and you compare it to letting someone into your room. This analogy even helped me, a young, experienced user of Facebook. Finally, in order to make users motivated to use Facebook you might want to mention directly the reward system that exists.
ReplyDeleteThat awesome that your grandfather asked that. My mom once told me she couldn't return the DVD to blockbuster because she couldn't figure out how to rewind it. It's funny how existing frames can help individuals identify with new technology, but can also be very limiting. Our generation grew up with the internet, DVD's, ipods, etc, so its hard to imagine how someone could view it from a different lens. It sounds like comparing all the features of facebook to every day things the average person would be familiar with is a good idea to introduce this technology.
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