Social Understanding, Placeness, and Identity Alignment: A Design Framework for Friendship-Supportive Youth Social Media

TL;DR

This paper introduces a design framework for youth social media that fosters friendship support by emphasizing social understanding, place, and identity alignment, based on extensive empirical research.

Contribution

It synthesizes five empirical studies into a comprehensive framework outlining nine design spaces to enhance youth friendship support on social media platforms.

Findings

Identified three core pillars: social understanding, sense of place, and identity alignment.

Mapped nine design spaces to support friendship formation and maintenance.

Provided a shared vocabulary for evaluating and designing youth social media interventions.

Abstract

We present a design framework for friendship-supportive youth social media, derived from a synthesis of five empirical studies with 331 youth participants (ages 13--25) using interviews, co-design, surveys, diary studies, and a field deployment. Iterative analysis of 209 design-relevant data points identified three pillars: \textit{Sense of Social Understanding} (interaction norms, interaction cues and scaffolding, social accountability and governance), \textit{Sense of Place} (third place and community, boundaries and personal spaces, shared presence), and \textit{Sense of Identity Alignment} (identity currency, identity plurality, relational identity signals). The framework maps nine design spaces through which platforms can support the conditions under which youth friendships form, deepen, and are maintained. It offers a shared vocabulary for locating contributions, comparing design interventions, and identifying under-explored areas for future work.