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
Christian Crumlish is the curator of the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library and has been designing and writing about online user experiences since 1994. He is a director of the Information Architecture Institute and co-chair of the monthly BayCHI program. He is the author of The Power of Many and is writing a book called Designing Social Interfaces for O'Reilly Media with Erin Malone. He studied philosophy at Princeton and painting at the San Francisco School of Art, and lives in Oakland, California, with his wife, Briggs, and his cat, Fraidy. Erin Malone is Principal with Tangible UX, and 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, Erin 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 other cross-company initiatives. Before Yahoo!, she was a Design Director at AOL, Creative Director at AltaVista, and chief Information Architect for Zip2. Erin was the founding editor-in-chief of Boxes and Arrows and is the author of several articles on interaction design history, design management, and is a founding member of the IA Institute. She is currently working on the book Designing Social Interfaces with Christian Crumlish for O'Reilly Media.
