Nooks: Social Spaces to Lower Hesitations in Interacting with New People at Work

TL;DR

Nooks is a Slack-based system that creates topic-based conversation rooms to reduce social anxiety and facilitate new workplace interactions, both online and offline.

Contribution

The paper introduces Nooks, a novel social space system that automatically organizes interest-based conversations to lower social hesitation at work.

Findings

Increased new interactions among participants.

Reduced anxiety about initiating conversations.

Enhanced awareness of potential social connections.

Abstract

Initiating conversations with new people at work is often intimidating because of uncertainty about their interests. People worry others may reject their attempts to initiate conversation or that others may not enjoy the conversation. We introduce a new system, Nooks, built on Slack, that reduces fear of social evaluation by enabling individuals to initiate any conversation as a nook -- a conversation room that identifies its topic, but not its creator. Automatically convening others interested in the nook, Nooks further reduces fears of social evaluation by guaranteeing individuals in advance that others they are about to interact with are interested in the conversation. In a multi-month deployment with participants in a summer research program, Nooks provided participants with non-threatening and inclusive interaction opportunities, and ambient awareness, leading to new interactions online and offline. Our results demonstrate how intentionally designed social spaces can reduce fears of social evaluation and catalyze new workplace connections.