Social media and content sharing applications are now more popular than ever. It is important for both researchers and practitioners in the area to understand the reasons why people share their content online – revealing motivations, technical factors and the user experience. My research aims to identify design solutions that can facilitate and positively affect the overall user experience of content sharing. Here, shared content is seen as a mediator of social interaction. In my talk I will present a theoretical framework for “Content-Mediated Social User Experiences” that I built, based on field trials and case studies with different shared content types. Specifically, I studied the sharing of exercise data, photos, music and playlist content, and collaboratively created videos as different content types, both over varying group contexts and sharing platforms. Im an currently in the process of validating and expanding the case study findings and the framework with the help of an online survey. My research and the resulting theoretical framework should help both practitioners and researchers in evaluating services that facilitate content sharing.

Jarno Ojala is a PhD Candidate at the Tampere University of Technology and hold an MSc. from University of Tampere (2010). Jarno interests span UX design, study design and organization, user evaluation, user studies, interaction design and usability engineering.