Designing Social Interfaces

Designing Social Interfaces

by Erin Malone, Christian Crumlish
Released September 2009
Publisher(s): O'Reilly Media, Inc.
ISBN: 9780596154929

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Book description

From the creators of Yahoo!'s Design Pattern Library, Designing Social Interfaces provides you with more than 100 patterns, principles, and best practices, along with salient advice for many of the common challenges you'll face when starting a social website. Designing sites that foster user interaction and community-building is a valuable skill for web developers and designers today, but it's not that easy to understand the nuances of the social web. Now you have help.

Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone share hard-won insights into what works, what doesn't, and why. You'll learn how to balance opposing factions and grow healthy online communities by co-creating them with your users.

  • Understand the overarching principles you need to consider for every website you create
  • Learn basic design patterns for adding social components to an existing site
  • Rein in misbehaving users on an active community site
  • Build a social experience around a product or service and invite people to join
  • Develop a social utility without having to build an entirely new infrastructure
  • Enable users of your site's content to interact with one another
  • Offer your members the opportunity to connect in the real world
  • Learn to recognize and avoid antipatterns: emergent bad practices in the social network and social media space

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Table of contents

  1. Advance Praise for Designing Social Interfaces
  2. Preface
  3. I. What Are Social Patterns?
    1. 1. Mommy, What’s a Social User Experience Pattern?
      1. A Little Social Backstory...
        1. Well, What About That Social Media? Can You Expand on That?
      2. What Do We Mean by Principle, Best Practice, and Patterns?
        1. Principle: A Basic Truth, Law, or Assumption
        2. Practice (or Best Practice): A Habitual or Customary Action or Way of Doing Something
        3. Pattern: A Model or Original Used As an Archetype
        4. The Importance of Anti-Patterns
      3. So, That’s All the Little Parts: Now What?
      4. Further Reading
    2. 2. Social to the Core
      1. Deliberately Leave Things Incomplete
        1. Pave the Cowpaths
        2. Strict Versus Fluid Taxonomies
      2. Palimpsest
      3. Social but Not Social Only
      4. Talk Like a Person!
      5. Conversation
      6. Self-Deprecating Error Message
      7. Ask Questions
      8. Your Versus My
      9. No Joking Around
      10. Don’t Break Email!
      11. Be Open
      12. Learn from Games
      13. Cargo Cult Anti-Pattern
      14. Respect the Ethical Dimension
      15. Further Reading
  4. II. I Am Somebody
    1. 3. You’re Invited!
      1. Engagement
      2. Sign-up or Registration
      3. Sign In
      4. Sign-In Continuity
      5. Sign Out
      6. Invitations
      7. Receive Invitation
      8. Send Invitation
      9. The Password Anti-Pattern
      10. Authorize
      11. Private Beta
      12. Welcome Area
      13. Reengagement
      14. Further Reading
    2. 4. Where’s the Rest of Me?
      1. Identity
      2. Profile
      3. Testimonials (or Personal Recommendations)
      4. Personal Dashboard
      5. Reflectors
      6. Identity Cards or Contact Cards
      7. Attribution
      8. Avatars
      9. Further Reading
    3. 5. We Are Here! We Are Here! We Are Here!
      1. A Brief History of Online Presence
        1. The Future of Presence
      2. Presence Actions and Facets
      3. Availability
        1. Stealth Mode
        2. Mood
        3. Environment
      4. Buddy List
      5. Activity Streams
        1. Statuscasting
      6. Microblogging
      7. Updates
      8. Updates Opt-in Disclosure
        1. Managing Incoming Updates
        2. Lifestreams
      9. Keep Company
        1. Signs of Life
        2. User Gallery
        3. Who’s Here Now?
      10. Further Reading
    4. 6. Would You Buy a Used Car from This Person?
      1. Reputation Influences Behavior
      2. Competitive Spectrum
      3. Levels
      4. Named Levels
      5. Numbered Levels
      6. Labels
      7. Awards
      8. Collectible Achievements
      9. Peer-to-Peer Awards
      10. Rankings
      11. Point
      12. Leaderboard
      13. Top X
      14. Tools for Monitoring Reputation
      15. Friend Ranking
      16. Further Reading
  5. III. Objects of My Desire
    1. 7. Hunters Gather
      1. Collecting
      2. Saving
      3. Favorites
      4. Displaying
      5. Add/Subscribe
      6. Tagging
      7. Find with Tags
      8. Tag Cloud
      9. Further Reading
    2. 8. Share and Share Alike
      1. Organic “Word of Mouth”
      2. Tools for Sharing
      3. Bookmarklet
      4. Send/Share Widget
        1. Activity Streams
      5. Private Sharing
      6. Send This
      7. Casual Privacy
      8. Share Application
      9. Give Gift
      10. Public Sharing
        1. Many Publics
      11. Share This
        1. Social Bookmarking
        2. Uploading to the Cloud
      12. Embedding
        1. Ongoing Sharing
      13. Further Reading
    3. 9. The Megalophone
      1. Broadcasting
      2. Blogs: Presentation
      3. Blogs: Ownership
      4. Microblogging
      5. Publishing
      6. Lifecycle
        1. Rights
      7. Terms of Service
        1. Licenses
        2. Public Domain
        3. Creative Commons
        4. Copyleft
        5. Copyright
      8. Further Reading
    4. 10. Long-Time Listener, First-Time Caller
      1. Soliciting Feedback
      2. Vote to Promote
      3. Thumbs Up/Down Ratings
      4. Ratings (Stars or 1–5)
      5. Comments
      6. Reviews
      7. Soliciting Feedback
      8. Further Reading
    5. 11. Watson, Come Quick!
      1. Synchronous Versus Asynchronous Communication
      2. Sign In to Participate
      3. Communicating
      4. Forums
      5. Public Conversation
      6. Private Conversation
      7. Group Conversation
      8. Arguments
        1. Flame Wars
        2. Vendettas
        3. Sock Puppets
      9. Further Reading
    6. 12. Barnraising
      1. Collaboration
      2. Manage Project
      3. Voting
      4. Collaborative Editing
      5. Edit This Page
      6. The Wiki Way
      7. Crowdsourcing
      8. Further Reading
    7. 13. Social Media Junkies Unite!
      1. Keeping Up
      2. Tuning In
      3. Following
      4. Filtering
      5. Recommendations
      6. Social Search
      7. Real-Time Search
      8. Conversational Search
      9. Pivoting
      10. Further Reading
  6. IV. A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood
    1. 14. One of Us, One of Us
      1. Relationships
      2. Find People
      3. Adding Friends
      4. Circles of Connections
      5. Publicize Relationships
      6. Unfriending
      7. The Ex-Boyfriend Anti-Pattern
      8. Groups
      9. Further Reading
    2. 15. Good Cop, Bad Cop
      1. Community Management
        1. Norms
        2. Role Model
        3. Potemkin Village (Anti-Pattern)
      2. Collective Governance
      3. Group Moderation
      4. Collaborative Filtering
      5. Report Abuse
      6. What’s the Story?
      7. Further Reading
    3. 16. Where in the World?
      1. The Local Connection
      2. Being Local
      3. Face-to-Face Meeting
      4. Party
      5. Calendaring
      6. Reminding
      7. Geo-Tagging
      8. Geo-Mapping
        1. Geo-Mashing
      9. Neighborhood
      10. Mobile and Location
      11. Further Reading
  7. V. But Wait...There’s More!
    1. 17. Open for Business
      1. Play Well with Others
        1. The Open Stack, the Social Stack
        2. Open Source
      2. Opening Out
      3. Badging
      4. Open Standards (Semantics and Microformats)
      5. Opening In
      6. Import
      7. Hosted Modules
      8. Going Both Ways
        1. Be the Glue
      9. Open APIs
      10. Honest Broker
      11. Further Reading
    2. 18. Other Contexts
      1. Thinking Mobile
      2. Inside the Enterprise
        1. Sign Up and Login (Sign In)
        2. The Corporate Identity and Profile
        3. Friends and Relationships
        4. The Status/Activity Stream
        5. Administration and Moderation
        6. Other Tools
      3. What’s Age Got to Do with It?
      4. For the Win
      5. Further Reading
  8. Epilogue
    1. And in the End...
  9. Index
  10. About the Authors
  11. Colophon
  12. Copyright

Product information

  • Title: Designing Social Interfaces
  • Author(s): Erin Malone, Christian Crumlish
  • Release date: September 2009
  • Publisher(s): O'Reilly Media, Inc.
  • ISBN: 9780596154929