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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Groundbreaking and essential, December 1, 2009
This review is from: Designing Social Interfaces: Principles, Patterns, and Practices for Improving the User Experience (Animal Guide) (Paperback)
Malone and Crumlish have done the user-experience design community an amazing service with this volume. It does the hard, rigorous work that most of us simply do not have time or dedication to do -- creating the first solid set of building blocks for designing socially driven digital platforms.
The book goes beyond the easy categories of things like "blogs & wikis" and breaks those and other compounds down into their essential elements, helping us make more informed and less platform-dependent decisions.
Design patterns are always challenging to produce, especially since designers inevitably nit-pick them to death. But these patterns are up to the challenge: they actually make sense, and I suspect will stand up handsomely to the persnickety-designer test. But even if you differ with some of their particulars, it's incredibly valuable to have the heavy lifting already done, so all you have to do is react, refine and "improve" for your own use.
More than a mere collection of patterns, the book doles out large helpings of hard-won wisdom from the authors and other veterans of the industry who have wrestled with the volatile, emergent nature of socially driven digital design.
If you're doing anything with social design, from being asked to create a corporate blog to enhancing the way employees share knowledge on your intranet, do yourself a favor and get familiar with Designing Social Interfaces.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
If you write user interface copy for social apps, use this book, February 9, 2010
This review is from: Designing Social Interfaces: Principles, Patterns, and Practices for Improving the User Experience (Animal Guide) (Paperback)
Designing Social Interfaces is an impressive compilation of knowledge about what makes social media applications work. It covers the entire range of what you need to think about if you're designing a UI for a social app, from high-level "Why do this?" to screen-by-screen advice on words to put on your site -- or not. It's a kind of soup-to-nuts checklist for anyone involved in designing social media, a guide to doing it right at every level.
Of particular interest to UI writers (or anyone else with the job of deciding what words will appear in a social app's UI) are some of the patterns in Chapter 2, for example using "your" versus "my" (the choice "can reinforce either a social or a solipsistic state of mind"), how to label blank spaces for users to fill in (answer: with a question), and how to "talk like a person!" (use a conversational tone). But the book is peppered throughout with other patterns of functionality that have implications for text in a UI, such as these:
* Welcome area
* Sign-up or registration
* Social search (i.e., search on user-contributed tags)
* Forums: creating and facilitating discussion
* Collaborative editing
* Saving an item for later viewing, sharing, or discussion
* Terms of service and licenses
* Reminders
Authors Crumlish and Malone, respectively the curator and founder of the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library, have saved the rest of us lots and lots of time by compiling this important guide. If you write copy for a social UI, don't reinvent the wheel -- use this book.
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Exhaustive, excellent, December 1, 2009
This review is from: Designing Social Interfaces: Principles, Patterns, and Practices for Improving the User Experience (Animal Guide) (Paperback)
This book is a fairly exhaustive catalog of most UI patterns in place today with sites that integrate social networking. There are some very interesting discussions about each pattern, when to use it and who uses it.
This book really shines when it breaks out to discuss the CONS of a pattern. Although this isn't done for all patterns - and I wish it was - it remains very insightful ways to learn more about a pattern.
If you are an alpha user of social networking, then you'll recognize most of these patterns and this book will help you catalog them and reference them when necessary. If you are not an alpha user, then the book serves as an education first.
Really well written - easy to read.
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