Christina Wodtke, Bryce Glass, Christian Crumlish, and Joshua Porter
Abstract
The Future is Social
The role of the information architect used to be straightforward; collect the content, analyze the content, organize the content. But in the new world order of Web 2.0, the amount of highly dynamic user-generated content makes old systems insufficient to deal with emerging findability problems, and ignore the more active role users demand to take on the web. The architect’s job is now to design dynamic personalized self-organizing systems.
Social websites have unique information architecture needs. We must put in place structures and affordances that invite participation and connecting, but the participants themselves determine the ultimate shape of the site. The art of designing such experiences requires a clear model of how people are represented in the system and what they are invited to do there.
In this workshop, we will explore four core elements: identity of the users, ability to create reputation, something for them to do, and a way to find and share social objects. We will cover the strategy of how to decide how to make your website social, and what social elements are useful. We will cover the elements of a social system. We will dive deep into how to keep users motivated and productive citizens of your websites, via robust identity and reputation systems. And of course we’ll cover the meat and potatoes of an IA’s life, interaction design and information retrieval and distribution systems … but with a social twist.
Throughout the day, we will also create the strategy and basic architecture for a new social website hands-on, so you can learn in context!
Workshop Details
Schedule
Morning
Strategy for Social Sites:
- Understanding the psychology of crowds
Elements of Social Websites:
- Identity, community and collaboration: how they make your website thrive
Exercise: Creating a social strategy for your site
Identity:
- Your site belongs to your users, give them a way to express themselves. Avatars, profiles, collections, presence all contribute to the way your users represent themselves and reach out to each other.
Exercise: First pass on social features and functionality for site
Reputation:
- How do you motivate positive contributions, and creating trusting and collaborative communities?
Discussion and feedback session; real world case studies from participants.
Afternoon
Interaction:
- The subtle interface tweaks that make big differences (copywriting, feature location, elegant and seductive forms…) and the way you use social pressure to promote desired usage.
Exercise: Second pass on core features, creating user flows for social systems
Virality & Social Findability:
- First we make the content findable, then we make the content find you. Tagging, sharing, lifestreams and other methods of content propagation will be covered.
Exercise: Design of key pages, wireframing inviting interfaces.
Community Nurturing:
- Launching an initial architecture is only a tiny baby step toward a vibrant community. Learn how to fight the cold start problem, manage trolls and evolve the group as it grows.
Open discussion of more real work problems, and discussion of future trends; enterprise 2.0 and beyond.
Learning objectives
Participants will get the basic understanding to enable them to start creating highly social systems, from tagging to full blown communities. Social websites are radically different than even the most dynamic of informational sites, and need special care.
1. What social features are appropriate for what kinds of sites?
2. How do you promote good behaviour and social responsibility online?
3. How to you manage content in a user-generated system?
4. How to you get your users to participate, how do you overcome the “cold start” problem?
Justification for a pre-conference
Social functionality is more critical to every type of website than ever before, from intranets to search, and IA must evolve to incorporate social tools and systems. This session should be mandatory for every practicing IA. Last year, Christian, Christina and Josh gave a one day bursting with information and Bryce covered only a tiny % of what he has learned at Yahoo in a single overflowing sessions. We will streamline—and make complementary—these presentations to more-thoroughly cover the materials and give time for hands-on participation.
Core IA-related issues
The practice of IA is typically creating the structural design of the website and the organization of the content within. In this workshop, we look at how to approach those tasks in a website that is essentially being created by the users themselves. Most importantly, we look at how to deal with the immense number of unknowns that come from social architecture.
Audiences
Professional IAs, interaction designers and other designers who have not worked with social functionality before, or have begun to and are beginning to realize the complexity of the problems involved with designing social sites. It’s also appropriate for product managers, design managers and others who are tangentially involved in the planning for design of social sites.
Where & when the session has been previously presented
Early versions of the material were presented at last year’s IA summit, Web 2.0 Expo east, SXSW, Doctrain East, and various other smaller internal venues.
Speaker Details
Christina Wodtke
Frequently found under the title Principal Instigator, Christina has most recently been developing new products at LinkedIn. Previously, she founded Cucina Media and developed the CMS PublicSquare. Before that she founded Boxes and Arrows, an online magazine of design; founded the Institute for Information Architecture; wrote Information Architecture, Blueprints for the Web, built the Search and Marketplace design team at Yahoo!, leading reinventions of the search and shopping product designs and has spoken on the topic of the human experience in information spaces at conferences worldwide.
Joshua Porter is a writer, web designer, and passionate user advocate. He is the founder of Bokardo Design, providing web design and strategy services for social web applications. Prior to founding Bokardo Design, Josh was the Director of Web Development at User Interface Engineering. Josh writes the popular blog Bokardo.com. He wrote the bestselling Designing Social Web Applications, published by New Riders.
Christian Crumlish is the curator of Yahoo!’s Design Pattern Library (http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns), where he is working on releasing an entire social media pattern language this year. He is also the author of “The Power of Many,” a book on social networking’s impact on the real world.
Bryce Glass is a Senior Interaction Designer at Yahoo! He works on Community Platforms and is professionally interested in: social media and user participation in online communities; models for representing user reputation; and concept modeling as part of the product development process. Bryce has an MS in Information Design & Technology from Georgia Tech and has worked as an in-house UI designer at Netscape, America Online, Sun Microsystems and Yahoo!