Saturday, 5:00pm, Venetian
Designing for social interaction is difficult. People are unpredictable, consistency is a mixed blessing, and co-creation with your users requires, at times, a dizzying flirtation with loss of control.
Familiar online social scenarios and behavioral patterns are becoming evident. By identifying and explaining these scenarios we give designers a vocabulary of design solutions for creating social interfaces.
For example, an interface element that encourages a user to invite their friends may be more “viral” (or spammy?) if it comes early in the signup flow, or it may be more focused and meaningful if it comes when the user has begun to enjoy the experience. The choice depends on your goals and the type of communities you hope to foster.
This talk should provide an overview and the building blocks; a reference set of muchdebated foundational documents to initiate, refresh, or jumpstart a designer’s social practice.
These are some examples of how a designer might apply the patterns and principles to solve real-world problems:
Problem: Help! I’m a designer being asked to add “social” to my site! What are the basics?
Solution Patterns: Conversational Voice, Identity, Profile, Relationships, Sharing
Problem: I have an active community on my site but people are misbehaving. How can I get that under control?
Solution Patterns: Leaderboard Antipattern, Community Management, Norms, Reputation (family), Flagging Abuse, Ratings, Model Citizen
Problem: We want to build a really cool social experience around [thingy] but we’re not sure how to get people to come join the fun [aka, the "cold start" problem]
Solution Patterns: Private Beta, Early Adopter, Invitation, Gradual Engagement, Welcome Area, Signs of Life, Leveling Up
Problem: I have a great idea for a social utility but I don’t want to have to first re-create the social infrastructure of the Web inside of it.
Solution Patterns: Badging Out, Import, Open APIs, Mashup Modules
Problem: People come and read my content, but they’re invisible to each other. How can I peel away the layers so they can participate with each other?
Solution Patterns: Keep Company, Presence, Statuscasting, Peer-to-Peer Awards, Nudging, the Wiki Way
Problem: I’m worried I’m missing an opportunity to help my members connect with each other in the real world.
Solution Patterns: Mapping, Geo-Tagging, Geo-Mashing, Event Making
The talk presents a family of social web design principles and interaction patterns that we have observed and codified, thus capturing user-experience best practices and emerging social web customs for web 2.0 practitioners.
We will feature sample patterns, principles, and best practices, and share hard-won insights into what works, what doesn’t, and why.
We begin with a “parent” principle, and offer rules for how to mix-and-match theindividual patterns and best practices, as well as overarching principles to consider before delving into specific patterns, practices, and techniques.
We will also identify antipatterns: emerging bad practices in the social network and social media space. “We need to add some social” is the de rigueur”… pop-up animation” of today. We will explain how these ill-conceived practices encourage bad behavior. The worst antipatterns violate ethical norms and deceive users, poisoning the community’s well.
For example, the social iPhone application Loopt employed the Spam Your Friends (engagement and signup) antipattern in their first release, earning them ill will and negative publicity. They have since attempted to smooth things over by apologizing and promising to drop the spammy functionality. Apology is a positive (customer
relationship) pattern.
Patterns show how to balance what Christopher Alexander called the opposing ”forces.” In architecture, these are literal forces such as gravity; structural engineering matters, as does the intended use or purpose of a space. Balancing these forces, then, requires solutions that recognize the need for supporting piers to hold up an
expansive ceiling.
In interface design, the opposing forces may be revealed as differences in values or interests among major stakeholders in a social system: the individuals, the community as a whole, and the “house” (the owner of the system). A sound approach to balancing these opposing interests is to co-create your social space in collaboration with the people who come to live there.
One example of a fundamental best practice for social design is the “Identity” pattern: Each individual user is empowered to choose and reflect outward an identity of their choice, distinct from their user login. The user is then effectively insulated from spam collectors and phishing sites.
Some of the patterns, principles, practices, and antipatterns we may cover are Design for Everyone, Palimpsest, Leave Unfinished, Conversational Voice, Your (Not My), Be Open, Eternal Beta, Early Adopter, Invitation, The Password Antipattern, Gradual Engagement, Welcome Area, Leveling Up, Profile, Faceted Identity, Avatar, Personal Dashboard, Statuscasting, Lifestream Signs of Life, Keep Company, Ambient Intimacy, Leaderboard, Sense-Making, Lurking Allowed, Favorites, Vote to Promote, Thumbs, Tagging, Flagging, Microblogging, GeoMashing, Sock Puppet, Thanks for Sharing, the Wiki Way, Circles of Intimacy, Stalking, the Ex-Boyfriend Antipattern, Ridiculously Easy Group Formation, Pivoting, Subscribe to Updates, Casual Privacy, Neighborhood,
Manifesting, and Social Object.
Designers and IAs will come away from the talk with an overview of fundamental principles and patterns to add to their arsenal of tools to use when solving complex social design problems and a framework for combining patterns together to create robust design solutions.
SPEAKERS’ BIOS
Christian Crumlish
Christian Crumlish has been designing and writing about online user experiences since 1994. He is the curator of the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library and is in his second elected term as a Director of the Information Architecture Institute. He studied philosophy at Princeton and painting at the San Francisco School of Art. He is the author of, most recently, The Power of Many: How the Living Web is Transforming Politics, Business, and Everyday Life (Wiley, 2004), and he is currently writing a book with Erin Malone called Designing Social Interfaces for O’Reilly Media. He lives in Oakland, California, with his wife, Briggs, and his cat, Fraidy.
Erin Malone
Erin Malone, Principal with Tangible UX, has over 20 years of experience leading design teams and developing social experiences as well as web and software applications and system-wide solutions. Prior to Tangible, she spent 4 years at Yahoo! leading the Platform User Experience Design team where they were responsible for building the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library and for providing design expertise to the popular YUI (Yahoo! User Interface Library). Additionally, she led the redesign of the Yahoo! Developer Network, oversaw the redesign of Yahoo!’s registration system, developed the ux team’s intranet and worked on cross-company Social Platform initiatives. Before Yahoo!, she was a Design Director at AOL, Creative Director at AltaVista and chief Information Architect for Zip2. She was the founding editor-in-chief of Boxes and Arrows, is the author of several articles on interaction design history and design management and a founding member of the IA Institute. She is currently working on the book Designing Social Interfaces with Christian Crumlish for O’Reilly Media.