Designing Social Interfaces: Principles, Patterns, and Practices for Improving the User Experience

by Christian Crumlish, Erin Malone

Overview

Designers, developers, and entrepreneurs today must grapple with creating social interfaces to foster user interaction and community, but grasping the nuances and the building blocks of the digital social experience is much harder than it appears. Now you have help.

In the second edition of this practical guide, UX design experts Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone share hard-won insights into what works, what doesn’t, and why. With more than 100 patterns, design principles, and best practices, you’ll learn how to balance opposing forces and grow healthy online communities by co-creating the experience with your users.

• Understand the overarching principles before applying tactical design patterns
• Cultivate healthy participation and rein in misbehaving users
• Learn patterns for adding social components to an existing site
• Encourage users to interact with one another, whether it’s one-to-one or many-to-many
• Use a rating system to build a social experience around products or services
• Orchestrate collaborative groups and discover the real power of social networks
• Explore numerous examples of each pattern, with an emphasis on mobile apps
• Learn how to apply social design patterns to enterprise environments

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781491919859
Publisher:	O'Reilly Media, Incorporated
Publication date:	08/30/2015
Edition description:	2nd ed.
Pages:	620
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Christian Crumlish leads product and user experience teams to deliver amazing cross-channel experiences.

He is VP Product at 7 Cups of Tea (7cups.com), and a mentor at Code for America. He was director of product at CloudOn, co-chairs the monthly BayCHI program and has been director of messaging products for AOL, curator of the Yahoo design pattern library, and a director of the Information Architecture Institute.

He is the author of the bestselling The Internet for Busy People, and The Power of Many, and co-author of Designing Social Interfaces, with a second edition in press.

He has spoken at BarCamp, BayCHI, South by Southwest, the IA Summit, Ignite, Web 2.0 Expo, PLoP, IDEA, Interaction, WebVisions, the Web App Masters Tour, the Italian IA Summit, UX Lisbon, MobileCamp Chicago (remote track), UX Israel Live, and at Web Directions South (Sydney), East (Tokyo), and @media (London).

Erin Malone has over 20 years of experience leading experience design teams and designing websites, web and software applications, social experiences and system-wide components and best practices. At Tangible UX, she leads user experience projects for several Fortune 500 companies as well as a host of startups.Prior to Tangible, she spent over 4 years at Yahoo! building and managing the Platform User Experience Design team where her team was responsible for creating 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 and worked on other cross-company initiatives including community products and the social platform.Before Yahoo!, she was a Design Director at AOL with teams working across community and personalized products, Creative Director at AltaVista where she launched the AltaVista Live portal and their community offerings. She built first generation entertainment guides and community tools at Zip2 for national newspaper partners including the NY Times, San Jose Mercury News and early websites for AOL greenhouse partners. She began her Silicon Valley life working at Adobe on their first website.She has led workshops and given talks at several conferences including the IA Summit, Interactions, WebVisions, Web 2.0 SF and NY, WebApp Masters, UIE webinars, BayChi, EuroIA, the German IA Konferenz, The Design Writing Summit and at CCA (California College of Arts).She was a founding member of the IA Institute, former chief editor of Boxes and Arrows, author of several articles and is the co-author of both editions of the book Designing Social Interfaces.

Table of Contents

Praise; Preface; Why We Updated This Book; What This Book Is About; The Visual Examples; How This Book Is Organized; Part I: What Are Social Patterns?; Part II: I Am Somebody; Part III: The Objects of Our Desire; Part IV: A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood; Part V: Closed and Open Social Networks; Sidebar Essays; Who Should Read This Book; Using the Interaction Patterns; What Comes with This Book; How to Contact Us; Safari® Books Online; Acknowledgments; What Are Social Patterns?; Chapter 1: Mommy, What’s a Social User Experience Pattern?; 1.1 A Little Social Backstory...; 1.2 What Do We Mean by Principle, Best Practice, and Patterns?; 1.3 So, That’s All the Little Parts: Now What?; 1.4 Further Reading; Chapter 2: Social to the Core; 2.1 Social but Not Social Only; 2.2 Deliberately Leave Things Incomplete; 2.3 Palimpsest; 2.4 Talk Like a Person!; 2.5 Don’t Break Email!; 2.6 Be Open; 2.7 Learn from Games; 2.8 Cargo Cult Anti-Pattern; 2.9 Haight-Ashbury Anti-Pattern; 2.10 Lord of the Flies Anti-Pattern; 2.11 Respect the Ethical Dimension; 2.12 Further Reading; I Am Somebody; Chapter 3: You’re Invited!; 3.1 Engagement; 3.2 Sign-Up or Registration; 3.3 Sign In; 3.4 Two-Factor Authentication; 3.5 PIN; 3.6 Fingerprint/Bio; 3.7 Sign-In Continuity; 3.8 Sign Out; 3.9 Invitations; 3.10 Receive Invitation; 3.11 Send Invitation; 3.12 The Password Anti-Pattern; 3.13 Authorize; 3.14 Private Beta; 3.15 Welcome Area; 3.16 Reengagement; 3.17 Further Reading; Chapter 4: Where’s the Rest of Me?; 4.1 Identity; 4.2 Profile; 4.3 Testimonials (or Personal Recommendations); 4.4 Personal Dashboard; 4.5 Reflectors; 4.6 Identity Cards or Contact Cards; 4.7 Attribution; 4.8 Avatars; 4.9 Portable Identity; 4.10 Further Reading; Chapter 5: Here We Are Now; 5.1 A Brief History of Online Presence; 5.2 The Future of Presence; 5.3 Buddy List; 5.4 Activity Streams; 5.5 Statuscasting; 5.6 Managing Incoming Updates; 5.7 Further Reading; Chapter 6: Would You Buy a Used Car from This Person?; 6.1 Reputation Influences Behavior; 6.2 Competitive Spectrum; 6.3 Levels; 6.4 Named Levels; 6.5 Numbered Levels; 6.6 Labels; 6.7 Awards; 6.8 Collectible Achievements; 6.9 Peer-to-Peer Awards; 6.10 Rankings; 6.11 Points; 6.12 Leaderboard; 6.13 Top X; 6.14 Tools for Monitoring Reputation; 6.15 Friend Ranking; 6.16 For the Win; 6.17 Further Reading; Objects of My Desire; Chapter 7: Hunters Gather; 7.1 Collecting; 7.2 Saving; 7.3 Favorites; 7.4 Displaying; 7.5 Add/Subscribe; 7.6 Tagging; 7.7 Find with Tags; 7.8 Tag Cloud; 7.9 Further Reading; Chapter 8: Share and Share Alike; 8.1 Tools to Enable Organic “Word of Mouth”; 8.2 Send/Share Icon; 8.3 Bookmarklet; 8.4 Private Sharing; 8.5 Send This; 8.6 Casual Privacy; 8.7 Ephemeral Sharing; 8.8 Give Gift; 8.9 Public Sharing; 8.10 Share This; 8.11 Reposting; 8.12 Social Bookmarking; 8.13 Uploading to the Cloud; 8.14 Embedding; 8.15 Passive Sharing; 8.16 Further Reading; Chapter 9: The Global Soapbox; 9.1 Broadcasting; 9.2 Blogging; 9.3 Podcasting; 9.4 Video blogging; 9.5 Microblogging; 9.6 Publishing; 9.7 Virtual Magazine; 9.8 Timestamp; 9.9 Rights; 9.10 Terms of Service; 9.11 Licenses; 9.12 Further Reading; Chapter 10: Long-Time Listener, First-Time Caller; 10.1 Soliciting Feedback; 10.2 Vote to Promote; 10.3 Thumbs Up/Down Ratings; 10.4 Ratings (Stars or 1–5); 10.5 Multifaceted Ratings; 10.6 Comments; 10.7 Reviews; 10.8 Soliciting Feedback; 10.9 Further Reading; Chapter 11: Watson, Come Quick!; 11.1 Synchronous versus Asynchronous Communication; 11.2 Sign In to Participate; 11.3 Meta-conversation; 11.4 Forum; 11.5 Public Conversation; 11.6 Private Conversation; 11.7 Group Conversation; 11.8 Arguments; 11.9 Response Notifications; 11.10 Further Reading; A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood; Chapter 12: Barnraising; 12.1 Collaboration; 12.2 Manage Project; 12.3 Voting; 12.4 Collaborative Editing; 12.5 Suggestions; 12.6 Edit This Page; 12.7 The Wiki Way; 12.8 Crowdsourcing; 12.9 Further Reading; Chapter 13: Heard It Through the Grapevine; 13.1 Keeping Up; 13.2 Tuning In; 13.3 Following; 13.4 Filtering; 13.5 Recommendations; 13.6 Social Search; 13.7 Real-Time Search; 13.8 Conversational Search; 13.9 Pivoting; 13.10 Anticipatory Content; 13.11 Further Reading; Chapter 14: One of Us, One of Us; 14.1 Relationships; 14.2 Find People; 14.3 Adding Friends; 14.4 Circles of Connections; 14.5 Publicize Relationships; 14.6 Unfriending; 14.7 The Ex-Boyfriend Anti-Pattern; 14.8 Groups; 14.9 What’s Age Got to Do with It?; 14.10 Dating and the One-on-One Connection; 14.11 Flirting; 14.12 Cybersex/Sexting; 14.13 Further Reading; Chapter 15: Good Cop, Bad Cop; 15.1 Community Management; 15.2 Collective Governance; 15.3 Group Moderation; 15.4 Collaborative Filtering; 15.5 Report Abuse; 15.6 Further Reading; Chapter 16: Where in the World-yet; 16.1 The Local Connection; 16.2 Being Local; 16.3 Face-to-Face Meeting; 16.4 Party; 16.5 Calendaring; 16.6 Reminding; 16.7 Geo-Tagging; 16.8 Geo-Mapping or Near Me Now; 16.9 Geo-Tracking or Where I’ve Been; 16.10 Neighborhood; 16.11 Further Reading; But Wait...There’s More!; Chapter 17: Corporations Are People, My Friend; 17.1 Consumer Enterprise Experiences; 17.2 Workers are Mobile; 17.3 Single Sign-On; 17.4 The Corporate Identity and Profile; 17.5 Contacts and Relationships; 17.6 What Is the Social Object?; 17.7 What Are the Jobs to be Done?; 17.8 The Status/Activity Stream; 17.9 Communicating Without Email; 17.10 Administration and Moderation; 17.11 Other Tools; 17.12 Further Reading; Chapter 18: Designing Around Openness; 18.1 Play Well with Others; 18.2 Opening Out; 18.3 Open Standards (Semantics and Microformats); 18.4 Opening In; 18.5 Hosted Modules; 18.6 Going Both Ways; 18.7 Open APIs; 18.8 Further Reading; Chapter 19: Epilogue; 19.1 And In the End...; About the Authors; O’REILLY®: Designing Social Interfaces;