Social experience design (SXD) is a young discipline emerging from online multiplayer games that helps players and businesses thrive through social satisfaction and network effect.
- Social experience design (SXD) uses a multiminded, social-centric approach to fill critical gaps in traditional design processes.
- The discipline leverages social satisfaction and network effect to address costs associated with both disruptive and productive behaviors.
- Social experience design spans activities from systems design and research to prototyping and applying academic insights.
What is social experience design (SXD)?
Social experience design (SXD) is an emerging discipline focused on how it feels to engage with others online. SXD is growing primarily out of online games, where it complements and extends the work of other design disciplines, like game and UX. By fostering belonging, social experience design looks to play an important role in helping people thrive together in digital spaces. Social experience design essentially designs for two things: social satisfaction and network effect. Each helps players, communities, products, and companies thrive.
Social satisfaction
Social satisfaction is about the quality of social life. Designing for the following helps to create positive social satisfaction:
- Social needs — The sense that social interaction satisfied personal needs.
- Social rewards — The feeling of gratification by social interaction.
- Social synergy — The perception of acting as a force multiplier in groups.
- Social value — The belief that your chosen groups are doing something of significance.
Additionally, a key part of designing for social satisfaction is proactively addressing negative social satisfaction (also known as dissatisfaction), of which disruptive behavior is a common cause.
Disruptive behaviors are generally the kinds of actions you DON’T want to see in digital spaces.
Network effect
Network effect is about community foundations, which means thinking about:
- Social bonds — Cultivating successful interactions that lead to connections.
- Social circles — Encouraging repeat play that makes bonds stronger.
- Social capital — Enabling reputation and trust that make connections valuable over time.
Why do we need a new design discipline?
By nature, social experiences are emergent. They may be enabled by a product or place, but the full experience is produced by participants. This plurality is important to note. Social experiences aren’t individual — they take a group. Therefore, designing for social experience means designing for groups.
But designing for groups isn’t what traditional disciplines like game design and UX were built to do. Their work and processes are user-centric, when what’s needed is social-centric.
Social-centric work (or multiminded work, if you prefer) centers on the needs and behaviors of groups. This requires a solid understanding of social dynamics, environmental factors, prosociality, disruptive behavior, and more. Designing for optimal group behavior requires full attention to social factors, which is difficult for more established disciplines to do on top of their existing responsibilities.
Helping products and companies be social-centric is the need that social experience design is intended to fill. And the need is as big as the internet. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the internet is one massive emergent social experience where interactions often aren’t positive enough. Understanding why is easy — the internet was originally designed for sharing information, not social interaction.
Social interaction emerged across the internet without any knowledge of how best to do it, leading to many of the online behavioral problems we see today. Over the years, however, lessons have been learned and best practices identified, all of which are finding a home in the toolboxes of social experience designers.
Why call it social experience design (SXD)?
Though the craft has been evolving for decades, social experience design is still young enough that there’s no general agreement in the industry on what to call it. Player behavior, player dynamics, prosocial, social dynamics, social behavior, social systems, or simply “social” — these are all terms being used for the same kind of design.
We propose calling the craft social experience design for the following reasons:
- Comprehensiveness — “Social experience” describes the full range of consideration more adequately than other terms. It includes what happens outside of games, which can affect social satisfaction.
- Accountability — Terms like “player behavior” point blame at players when, in fact, products can be at fault for generating undesirable behavior.
- Familiarity — Both “social” and “experience” are familiar terms to designers and non-designers. It builds on other disciplines, such as user experience (UX) and customer experience (CX).
- Approachability — Industry folks have frequently bristled at terms like “prosocial,” which they’ve called “academic.”
What problems does SXD help address?
Social experience design generally tackles two kinds of behavior problems, disruptive and productive, each with their own respective costs when social quality is poor.
Disruptive behavior, like harassment, can ruin intended experiences, while productive behavior, like prosociality, can elevate them. As a company, ignoring either type can come at a high cost:
- Disruptive behavior costs — Disruptive behavior creates high negative social satisfaction, which leads to player churn and high moderation costs.
- Productive behavior costs — Lack of productive behavior creates low positive social satisfaction, which leads to player churn and then growing production costs to create fresh content that retains players.
To address these costs and improve the player experience overall, companies should focus on two goals that social experience design has evolved to help with:
- Minimize disruptive behavior — Proactively reduce (or ideally avoid) unwanted behavior to keep social dissatisfaction and moderation costs low.
- Maximize productive behavior — Proactively foster prosociality, sociability, creativity, and more to boost positive social satisfaction, connection, and long-term retention.
While it may be tempting to think that minimizing disruptive behavior will foster more positive behavior, this isn’t necessarily true. Less bad doesn’t create more good. Your game could have low disruption and still not be socially sticky, as illustrated in the graphic below:
This is why social experience designers need to care about more than disruptive behavior. Mitigating disruption is good, but it won’t do any of the following:
- Add more fun to an experience
- Produce new prosocial activity
- Make things more socially rewarding
- Help players feel their participation matters
For multiplayer games and social products to reach their full potential, they must be socially satisfying (high in positive satisfaction, low in negative) and be strong in network effect (organically fostering a thriving community).
Essentials of social experience design
Core principles
These are fundamental values and guidelines for SXD:
- Social-centric / multiminded thinking — Prioritize a social-centric approach rather than a user-centric one. SXD designs for different minds interacting all at once. Great social spaces serve all participants, so a diversity-first mindset isn’t optional — it’s foundational.
- Whole river design — Treat social behavior as an end-to-end experience, not a moderation problem that starts after downstream disruption. Design so that productive behavior is the natural outcome of the experience. (Also see the Rafting Model.)
- Two-factor satisfaction — Identify and account for both positive and negative social satisfaction in your designs. Aim to produce the former and not the latter.
- Relational loops — Create repeat play and moments where players become meaningful to each other. Moments that build bonds can evolve into strong networks, which become the fabric of thriving communities.
A design method for creating little loops of prosocial activity.
Design process
There are three steps in the social experience design process:
- Identify the right problem — Start with a solid understanding of the problem space and the mix of people interacting within it. Get to root causes. Identify sources of conflict and negative satisfaction, as well as opportunities to boost positive satisfaction. Conduct social and industry research, competitive analysis, surveys, and more.
- Find the right solution — Ideate, identify, and devise what will effectively solve the problem, create positive social satisfaction, and strengthen the community through network effect. Artifacts can include sketches, storyboards, social flows and experience maps, wireframes, prototypes, simulations, mockups, and more.
- Ensure the right execution — Work with partners to deliver the best possible version of the solution. Measure social satisfaction and network effect to gauge whether you’re achieving the desired outcomes.
Key skills
A few skills have proven to be particularly important for social experience designers:
- Systems design — Defining how all elements work in concert to shape social behavior.
- Adaptability — Having the ability to succeed in ambiguous situations.
- Creativity — Generating fresh ideas on demand.
- Concept translation — Having a watchful eye for useful ideas in other fields and adapting them to digital spaces.
- Pattern recognition — Having the ability to identify recurring behaviors, signals, structures, and more. Maintaining a wide knowledge of existing social features, systems, and products.
- Vision and strategy — Creating a compelling, unifying vision that maps to a practical plan.
Social experience design involves a wide variety of work:
- Social mechanics
- Gameplay loops
- Behavior feedback and intervention systems
- Reputation systems
- Environments, characters, and narratives
- Social architecture (virtual and physical)
- Service and organizational plans
- Community pacts and policies
- Communication tools
- Group systems
- Onboarding experiences
- Community messaging
- Sharding strategy
- And more!
What does good social experience design look like?
Though there are numerous ways to evaluate and measure social experiences, one method that’s special to the Digital Thriving Playbook is the CGI framework.
Here’s an example of using CGI to identify success and warning signs in social experiences:
| Success signs | Warning signs | |
| Individual | Players generally feel satisfied interacting with strangers Players feel important to their teams Players have adequate time and space to learn and practice | Players feel uncomfortable with or and excluded by strangers Players feel ill-equipped to play in matchmade games Players must publicly demonstrate new skills |
| Group | Group engagement is satisfying and memorable Groups easily spin-up, reassemble, and reorganize | Groups are mostly disposable and forgettable Organizing groups is difficult |
| Community | Secondary connections are ever present and low pressure Personal networks naturally form and grow stronger, becoming cores of the community | Players feel pressured to add people to friend lists Players don’t feel there is any real sense of community, and they don’t see much community engagement at scale |
Additional evaluation approaches are listed at the end of this article.
Hiring or becoming a Social Experience Designer
Throughout the article, we emphasized that social experience design is a young discipline that’s known by different names. This makes hiring or becoming a Social Experience Designer challenging.
We offer a few tips:
- Companies — Assign a team member to lead your social experience design efforts and give them time and room to grow. The Playbook is a great resource for growing their knowledge, and we’ve provided a few links at the end of this article to get you started.
- Professionals (designers or otherwise) — Integrate social-centric thinking and related tasks into your current role. Many folks in SXD started the same way.
- Students or non-professionals — Warning: there is no clear career path yet. Our suggestion is basically the same for professionals — pursue a more established discipline, develop your SXD knowledge, and integrate that knowledge and social-centric thinking into your work.
Now what?
To learn more about tools and concepts related to social experience design, check out the following articles:
