Making Social Media Activity Analytics Intelligible for Oneself and for Others: A “Boundary Object” Approach to Dashboard Design

• Published in: Human Interface and the Management of Information: Information, Knowledge and Interaction Design pp. 112 - 123
• Main Author: Lambotte, François
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Cham Springer International Publishing 2017
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Subjects: Analytics; Boundary object; Dashboard; Intelligibility; Social media
• ISBN: 3319585207; 9783319585208
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-58521-5_8

Created in 2013, our laboratory works on the intelligibility of the activity of social media for others (e.a community animators) and for oneself (e.a member of the community) in a professional context. To bridge the gap between existing measures of activity, visualization of data and intelligibility of activity, we have set up a multidisciplinary team at the crossroads of these various players and knowledge. The goals of this team are to develop intelligible measures of the activity grouped together in a dashboard and to evaluate their contribution to the community’s dynamics. Inspired by the work of Star and Griesemer [16] on boundary objects and standardized methods, this paper aims to explain how we create, adapt and negotiate the current development of our dashboard’s prototype - conceived as a boundary object - sufficiently “robust” to achieve common objectives and “plastic enough” to meet the diverse interests of the different actors involved in the project.