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

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

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.