Expressive Social Media:
Integrating visual and expressive interaction to enrich connection in social media.

Motivation

Social media platforms provide a common space for people worldwide to connect and interact. However, limited interaction features and a shift towards content curation impose constraints on expressivity, diminish user agency, and hinder meaningful connections on social media.
The figure shows three major platforms, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram , all offering the same limited set of interactions.

Methodology

To better understand how people experience social media, we:

Conducted a need-finding survey:
We began with a survey to identify users’ needs, challenges, and frustrations with current platforms. Insights from this survey informed a set of design guidelines.
Conducted an exploratory user study with two design probes:

– A/B technology probe study: We designed two simple prototypes — one representing a baseline social media experience, and the other implementing new interaction and connection features based on our design guidelines — to explore how these differences influence user perception and behavior.

– One-on-one co-design sessions: We worked with 16 participants in co-design sessions to reflect on their current social media experiences and collaboratively envision more meaningful and expressive alternatives.

Needfinding Survey

The survey included 50 participants and combined Likert-scale and open-ended questions to explore their experiences, sense of connection, and agency on social media platforms. This figure shows participant demographics and their aggregated responses. Darker colours indicate higher scores on a 1 to 5 scale.

Design goals

From the need finding survey and literature, we extracted design goals (DG) focused on enhancing social media interactions to:

DG1) Enable meaningful, global connections,

DG2) Foster playfulness and inclusivity to provoke user curiosity and keep them engaged,

DG3) Enhance user agency with transparent algorithms, and

DG4) Enabling more personalized and fine-grained responses interactions that go beyond binary choices,

The first technology probe serves as the baseline for the existing design by following the commonplace social media design template. The second technology probe incorporates our design goals (DG1-4)

Probe Overviw: Expressive feedback and Visualization

Feed Page and non-binary interactions Global View Connection View

The feed page allows users to respond to posts in a more nuanced way—beyond simple likes—by indicating how much they liked, disliked, or were ambivalent towards a post. Users can also select a colour to represent the emotion the post evoked, adding a non-linear, affective layer to social engagement.

In Global view, users see all their connections around the world. Active connections—those with recorded interaction—are shown in red, and inactive connections appear in gray.

In Connection view, the visualization focuses on the strength of interaction between the user and their contacts. Curved lines connect them to their connections, where the thickness and color intensity of each line encode the volume of interaction.

The time slider allows users to explore how their social network has evolved over the years.

Global View

In this view, users see the full spatial distribution of their social network, with each dot representing a person they are connected to. Using the time slider, they can observe how their network grows or shifts over the years.

Red dots represent people the user interacted with during the selected year.
Gray dots represent existing connections with no interaction in that year.

Clicking a dot reveals a floating profile with the contact’s avatar, name, and interaction count. As the user changes the year using the slider, the interaction count dynamically updates, allowing them to explore how their relationships evolve over time.

Connection View

This view visualizes the user's active relationships and the depth of these connections through curved lines that extend from the user to each active contact for the selected year.

The thickness and blue color intensity of each line encode the amount of interaction — thicker and darker lines represent stronger, more frequent interactions.

Clicking on a line highlights the corresponding contact and displays their avatar, name, and a button to view the interaction summary. As the user adjusts the time slider, the view updates dynamically to reflect how interaction levels have changed — offering a temporal lens on the strength and evolution of social ties.

Key insights:

In the baseline versus redesigned probe comparison, participants valued visualization as a way to make social interaction visible and navigable. The world map and connection lines gave them a global view of where posts come from, who they were engaging with, and how those interactions accumulate over time, turning the feed into something they could reflect on and explore rather than just scroll through.

Participants described the visual view of connections as meaningful for discovery and perspective taking: it helped them notice which regions and communities they were not connected with, and it suggested new paths for outreach or renewed interaction with weaker ties.

Several also framed the global visualization as a way to counter narrow information diets by revealing when attention and engagement cluster in a single region, making echo chamber patterns easier to notice.

Alongside the visualization layer, participants appreciated moving beyond binary likes. The slider and color based reactions made it easier to express nuance and emotion without forcing a comment, supporting more expressive engagement.

Finally, the study highlighted a strong desire for agency: participants wanted clearer control over what is curated into their feeds, including transparency and feedback mechanisms that actually change what they see.

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