A Simple and Effective Google+ Circle Segmentation Architecture

I admit it… I’m kind of anal retentive. I’m not a germophobe or a neat freak per se. I’ve never been diagnosed with OCD. But I do have this thing about organization. I like things in their place—organized in such a way that I (or someone else) will intuitively be able to find them. This is an attribute of many people in my profession (user experience design, information architecture); we do our best to make content online easier to find and consume.

Remember, you can add accounts to multiple Circles…

Enter, Google+ and their nifty new Circles feature. Circles are a very useful means of segmenting people within your online social graph. Google is wisely making it easier for people to selectively share content online within their new social network offering. Users may place people within audience segments (Circles) in order to make sure they’re sharing and consuming content that is more relevant to their relationships. In other words, only your closest friends get to see the pictures from your ski trip to Vail, while a broader audience may get to check out that article you contributed to A List Apart.

After playing with G+ for about a week, I noticed that I was already becoming a bit dismayed by my Circle strategy (or lack thereof); I was avoiding adding people altogether due to Circle paralysis. So, combining my anal retentiveness need to organize with overcoming Google+ Circle paralysis, and you’ve got someone who actually put a lot of thought into an extensible segmentation architecture that should grow as the size of my (and your) Google+ network expands. So, here goes, and remember, this is a first draft—your feedback can only make this better!

Circle Segmentation Strategy

First off, it’s important to remember that Circles should be used to segment both how you share and how you consume content. This is a key element in setting up your segments. Google+ makes it easy to pick specific segments (even individuals) to share content with when posting. Users may also select content to consume by loading that Circle (click on it in the left sidebar on your Home screen) into their stream.

Content Sharing

The sharing segments are relatively straightforward, and imitate how people normally share information in real life (IRL). There are only three to keep things simple and scalable:

• Inner Circle – this includes family and close friends that you know and spend time with IRL. Only drop people into this circle that you would be willing to share more private/personal information with.
• Work – this is the Circle that includes your colleagues, business associates and clients. This Circle is used primarily to share work-related information. For extra credit, you may further segment this group into project teams e.g. Work: Project Name. Google+ has some powerful collaboration & communication tools—especially combined with Google Docs—and could easily be used to facilitate remote team meetings and working sessions. (I’ve seen talk from Google engineers about implementing nested circles. The project team concept would be a good use case for this type of functionality.)
• Everybody Else – place anyone who isn’t a close family member/friend or business associate into this Circle. Random strangers who start following you? Check. That girl from high school who you haven’t seen since graduation? She goes here. The dude who gave you his business card at the networking event? Him too… Call this Circle something clever; I think I’m going with, “Sharing: Opposable Thumbs.” I’m considering adding the Sharing selector to remind myself that this Circle is intended primarily for sharing content that I create with a broader audience. I don’t want to consume content from this Circle i.e., see these people in my stream.

Content Consumption

This is where things can get a bit trickier based on the type of content you’re interested in consuming. The goal here is to be able to control the fire hose which can get overwhelming—especially if you have a large network.

• Topic of Interest – add as many topic Circles as you want based on the themes that you care about and the people in your network creating content about those topics. For example, if you are interested in movies, create a Movies Circle and add anyone in your network who is a film buff. Create a Crocheting Circle and add anyone who loves to talk about the latest crocheting trends.
• Geography – add people to Circles based on where they live. This could be useful if you’re traveling to New York for a big design conference, and you’re interested in hearing from people in your network about NYC news, night life or upcoming events.
• Brands – Google+ has officially asked brands to refrain from participating in their new network at this point, but brands will undoubtedly soon be a part of the experience. Each brand will approach their interaction within the network in a unique way, but I think it may be a good idea to consider aggregating any corporate/branded accounts into a Brand Circle as they begin to appear.

Remember, you can add accounts to multiple Circles, so your movie loving, crocheting aunt from Denver may end up in Inner Circle, Denver, Movies and Crocheting. Or a brand like IBM could appear in Work, Brands and Technology. It’s my hope that setting up this segmentation architecture should make it easier to control the content that you see in your stream while helping frame how you share content with others.

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