Improving social connection through a communities-of-practice-inspired cognitive work analysis approach

Increasingly, people work in socially networked environments. With growing adoption of enterprise social network technologies, supporting effective social community is becoming an important factor in organizational success.

Relatively few human factors methods have been applied to social connection in communities. Although team methods provide a contribution, they do not suit design for communities. Wenger's community of practice concept, combined with cognitive work analysis, provided one way of designing for community.

We used a cognitive work analysis approach modified with principles for supporting communities of practice to generate a new website design. Over several months, the community using the site was studied to examine their degree of social connectedness and communication levels.

Social network analysis and communications analysis, conducted at three different intervals, showed increases in connections between people and between people and organizations, as well as increased communication following the launch of the new design.

In this work, we suggest that human factors approaches can be effective in social environments, when applied considering social community principles.

This work has implications for the development of new human factors methods as well as the design of interfaces for sociotechnical systems that have community building requirements.