The fundamental components of displaying interactive “presence” online has tended to break down into two facets: status and availablity.

Availability shows other people whether the user might be open to direct contact in real time

Status might take numerous forms and is a way of updating other people about some aspect of the user’s life at the time they were prompted to check in.

The primary principle to keep in mind when designing presence interfaces is to maximize opportunities for your users to declare themselves present to one another (similar to leaving footprints or other human traces). Practically speaking, this breaks down into a few actions that the user or system can take:

There are a number of different aspects or facets of status, beyond availability, that can be included in an update, including but not necessarily limited to the following:

Finally, there’s the public with whom a user’s availability, status, mood, location, and so on are shared, referred to in the old instant-messenger context as their “buddy list.”

Availability is the bottom line for online presence, as demonstrated in Figure 5-3. If you’re available, that’s fairly straightforward. It means, ostensibly, that it’s alright for others to contact you (interrupt you) in real time. Unavailability can take several flavors (away, busy, or idle). These facets originated in the context of messenger and chat applications, but they map fairly consistently to other persistent presence indicators.

Figure 5-3. Perhaps the most fundamental bit of presence information is available versus unavailable.

Richer options for status are possible (beyond simply available or not). Many applications with presence features give the user the ability to either manually enter a status update (generally, what she’s currently doing) or have some application or object update her status automatically. Status information usually can be layered on top of availability information, as shown in Figure 5-4.

Figure 5-4. Beyond indicating availability, a presence status update might also indicate the activity in which the user is currently engaged.

With a mood selector such as the one shown in Figure 5-5, the user can indicate how she currently feels (something otherwise rather difficult to discern through cold mechanical interfaces). Beware of trying to supply a complete taxonomy of human emotions. The chances are good that you’ll overcomplicate things.

Figure 5-5. A mood vocabulary can be free-form or based on a controlled list. Neopets offers four standard moods: happy, sad, angry, and sick.

Identifying your current location, either to other people or to applications, enables geographical information such as proximity and physical availability to come into play (see Chapter 16). Location information can be entered manually or detected automatically using services such as GPS, mobile phone cell towers, or by polling a geographical information broker.

Twitter users developed their own folk syntax for location that uses “L:” as a prefix, followed by latitude and longitude information or place names. This came about before the service added the option to share location information automatically when posting.

This pattern is also knowns as “Who’s Here Now?”

The interface pattern for managing and displaying availability may also be referred to as online presence indicators (OPIs). As Figure 5-6 and Figure 5-7 show, they provide a way for users to display to other people (either the public or their contacts, depending on the rules of the system) when they are available for contact and when they are not.

Figure 5-6. A small set of icons can indicate at a glance who is available, who is idle, and who is away.

Figure 5-7. A simpler model might show just a subset of your contacts and indicate which are currently active, as in this Facebook module.

Users need to see who else is online, available, and open to contact.

There are really two approaches. The prevailing approach to this pattern today is to show availability automatically, although this can have negative consequences for people who want to preserve their privacy or are actively hoping to avoid certain people.

The older pattern, established in first-generation IM apps, gives people the option to visually identify themselves in one of three possible states, “Available,” “Busy,” or “Offline” (these are explained further in Table 5-1). Additionally, if technically feasible, the client can identify the user as “Idle” if she is away from the computer for a set period of time.

Adopt a set of consistent icons for these three states (or four, if you include “Idle”). Studies show that traffic-light colors (red, green, amber) don’t map well to these choices, even though they are widely used among IM applications. This is mainly because although Available can be easily mapped to Go (green), three of the states (Busy, Offline, and Idle) are all equivalent to Stop (red), and none of them map particularly well to Slow Down/Proceed with Caution (amber).

This pattern does persist with some newer products, as well, such as WhatsApp, which is shown in Figure 5-8.

Figure 5-8. WhatsApp offers a range of availability choices, including the “traditional” options such as Available and Busy, but also other practical status choices such as “Battery about to die.”

Revealing availability is the fundamental building block of online presence. Providing your users with simple ways to do this fosters the sense of presence and availability that helps a social system feel inhabited by real people with realistic comings and goings.

Environment

An indication of what music the user is currently listening to is the most common environment report in presence updates. This can be used to give the flavor of the person’s environment, and doubles as a potential talking point. The user can manually fill in a “what I’m listening to” field or a status field for this purpose, or she can set an application to read what music is currently playing from the operating system or device, as demonstrated in Figure 5-9. The process of uploading this information to an ongoing stream is referred to as “scrobbling” (as popularized by Last.fm).

Figure 5-9. An application can automatically detect the current song playing in an application such as iTunes and assign its identifying information as the user’s current status. Often, a musical note symbol serves as a clue to the user’s friends that the information wasn’t entered manually and is in fact song data.

The user wants a distinct list of people she knows (friends, contacts, coworkers, family) to communicate with in real time (Figure 5-10). The term “buddy list” is now somewhat outmoded and associated primarily with legacy IM apps, but the notion remains under other names, such as “friends.”

Use this pattern when offering just-in-time communications, such as instant messaging.

Figure 5-10. Facebook is showing me some of the folks I engage with frequently as well as their activity status.

Real-time communications and the buddy list to support them add an immediate and real-life component to what are often asynchronous online experiences.

Examples

Slack, a consumer enterprise communication app built on IRC patterns shows you people you’ve interacted with along with their online status (Figure 5-11).

Figure 5-11. Those dots would be green if any of my buddies were available right now in Slack.

Statuscasting (also known as Microblogging or Updates) is a way for users to create short posts. These are often aggregated into a stream and can consist of text, pictures, or video.

Users want to see what their friends have been doing presented in a convenient format. Additionally, applications derive an advertising benefit from being able to share with the public or a controlled audience what their users have been doing. These updates can serve as reminders to other users about what is possible within the system.

You can produce and consume updates in nearly every imaginable context: across a single application or network, across the Web, on mobile devices, and so on. You can also display them in a context-sensitive manner, presenting information that is relevant to what a user is currently consuming. Here are additional possibilities:

Updates aim to provide users with delightful, personally relevant, timely content that engages them, helps them connect with others and participate in one another’s lives, and encourages their participation in the service.

To accomplish this, create syndicated digests of user activity from content-producing sources and third-party products, and make them available to content consuming properties and other sites.

A sophisticated vitality system will learn about the user’s preferences by tracking clickthrough, so if the items in the stream start with a “good enough” guess, they can improve through iterative refinement of the weighted algorithm that selects items. The experience for an ordinary user, then, is to be shown updates presented more or less as “things we think you’d want to see based on who you are and where you are in the product.”

Updates tend to follow the form of subject, verb, and object, with an optional indirect option, as discussed in Chris Messina’s presentation on open activity streams (http://bit.ly/1gndq5X). Thus, here are some possible implementations:

Sometimes, all you need to do is say a few words or share a short thought. Microblogging addresses that need without the heavy-duty interface or overhead of blogs.

Technology can be cold and impersonal. When the concept of a “ghost in the machine” first arose, it was used to deride Descartes mind-body dualism, ridiculing the idea that the body is a simple meaty mechanism and the spirit is some ghostly presence that imbues it with humanity. Dualism has fallen out of fashion in philosophical circles, but the truth is that in today’s online social systems, there is a fundamental duality baked right in. The machinery connects us, but without the human presences (the ghosts), it is simply a tangle of wires and electronic impulses.

In the real world, we like to know that there are other people around, coming and going, adding to the life of a place. An abandoned building is scary, but one that has signs of life can be much warmer and more welcoming. There are a number of ways to communicate this sense of life in a social interface.

The easiest way to communicate to your returning visitors the liveliness of your social environment is to present them with a summary of recent activities upon login, ideally those of people to whom they’re connected. For new users it might still be worthwhile to show them examples of recent activities, perhaps anonymizing the identities of the users to preserve their privacy. This is what LinkedIn does, and it doubles as a reminder to the user of the range of activities she can engage in within the service (Figure 5-16).

Figure 5-16. LinkedIn displays a series of clusters reporting on recent activities in the user’s network, giving a sense of the health and, yes, vitality of the network.

Another technique for signaling the transient presence of other visitors is a grid of faces or avatars, as you see in Skype (Figure 5-17).

Figure 5-17. Skype tries to show you faces but also shows you a lot of dummy avatars.

Yahoo! designer Bryce Glass once said: