Social Understanding, Placeness, and Identity Alignment: A Design Framework for Friendship-Supportive Youth Social Media
For social media designers and researchers, this framework provides a structured vocabulary to guide and evaluate design interventions for youth friendship support, though it is a qualitative synthesis rather than a quantitative breakthrough.
This paper presents a design framework for friendship-supportive youth social media, synthesized from five empirical studies with 331 youth participants. The framework identifies three pillars—Sense of Social Understanding, Sense of Place, and Sense of Identity Alignment—and nine design spaces to support youth friendship formation, deepening, and maintenance.
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.