Customer Reviews

Designing Social Interfaces: Principles, Patterns, and Practices for Improving the User Experience (Animal Guide)

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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.

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.

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.

I am a digital strategist laying out a website to be used by 22,000 employees to support collaborative ideation. This book has been an essential reference; helping me to break down the project into sensible sub-projects and offering a robust list of patterns to consider. I have also found the contributions by outside authors to be very interesting and the overall writing style superb.

This is a great reference for social design patterns. It covers patterns from all sorts of "social" sites from commenting systems, to virtual prizes/badges, to whether you should describe pages to users as "my dashboard" vs "your dashboard". Crumlish and Malone have obviously had direct experience with all these patterns and give great descriptions of the when's, how's and why's/why not's. A very worthwhile reference.

This excellent handbook of Patterns for Designing Interfaces for The Social Web and Mobile Applications contains extremely valuable examples of superior Interface Components and Approaches to designing for the Social Web. If you are already in the process of designing a Social Web Application or Mobile Interface to that Application this book definitely will guide your selection of content for that Software Tool or Widget. As a beginner in the design of Interfaces involving Social or Collaborative Content I could have benefited from a more step-by-step guide to determining the goals and constraints of a Social Application prior to choosing the Patterns which will enable an excellent user interface. This guidebook to Social Web and Mobile Interface Patterns will become the Standard Excellent Reference Work for Web Design Studios executing Social Applications. If on the other hand you require (like myself) a functional guide to the steps in defining and constructing a site and a taxonomy of possible goals and constraints for your design project, this reference work may be a bit more advanced than would suit those familiarization goals.

--Ira Laefsky

First, a disclaimer. I am a contributor to this book, as well as a friend to the authors.

Believe me, however, when I say that Designing Social Interfaces is a critical reference to keep in your toolkit if you design, product manage or even just participate in social communities online. True, these are design patterns like you may be familiar with from Jennifer Tidwell's (also excellent) Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design but DSI factors in a critical (and complex) fact: software designed to be shared amongst many, presents vastly different challenges than that designed to be used alone.

In a one-to-one interaction (person to machine), the challenges are, at this point in the computing revolution, somewhat known: challenges of clarity (what can I do here?); usability (how do I proceed? how do I recover from a misstep?); security (is my data safe?)

Social interfaces add whole new dimensions to the task of creating elegant interfaces. Most importantly, the messy dimension of OTHER PEOPLE. Now, the discerning interface designer must consider issues like: individual motivations, egos, cliques and vendettas. This brave new world draws upon disciplines as diverse as sociology, psychology and behavioral economics (oh, and, btw - you STILL will have to work a layer in Photoshop from time to time.) I have been designing community software professionally for more than 10 years, and the challenges it presents are still daunting to me.

Designing Social Interfaces rises admirably to the task of giving people like me a helping hand.

First of all, it is a gorgeous book: if you think you're familiar with the O'Reilly 'house' editorial designs (functional, attractive, but.. just a little bit staid), then you should take a look inside DSI and prepare to be pleasantly surprised. There are abundant, full-color examples drawn from HUNDREDS of completely contemporary interface examples. (I shudder when I think of how many websites and applications the authors must have created accounts on to gather the source material for this book.)

The illustrations are invaluable, giving real, practical and tangible evidence of the larger patterns and trends that DSI identifies. It's one thing to say "Talk Like a Person!" (pp. 26) -- it's a whole other thing to see example after example of succesful social software sites that accomplish this with grace. I'll point out, as well, that the authors succeed in following their own advice: the entire book is written in a friendly, straightforward manner. This is professional advice, given by professionals, and never feels 'dry' or overly-academic.

I feel that one of the greatest services the book provides is in identifying and, perhaps more importantly, NAMING all of these patterns that we can see in evidence across contemporary sites. In my day-to-day work activities, I have taken to referring to many of these patterns by name ("Wait, are we just propping up a Potemkin Village here?") DSI has started to permeate my working mind, and inculcated itself into my patterns of discourse and persuasion. That, IMO, is how you can tell a pattern library is well-done -- when it just feels so 'right' that it becomes easier to think within it than without.

At a time when I was painted in a corner, in need of swift assistance which articulated social media user experience as well as user interface design in a thoughtful, studied manner, Designing Social Interfaces, by: Christian Crumlish & Erin Malone truly came to my rescue. Written for both expeditious access to solid research and casual perusing, Designing Social Interfaces has become a staple in my Information Architecture toolbox. I strongly recommend this volume to any solution practitioner within the worlds of IA, UX, UI, and social media strategy.

Hats off, and great thanks, to both Mr. Crumlish and Ms. Malone

Sincerely,
Trent Sherrell
IA/UX & Social Media Strategist
trent@tSherrell.com

I am currently developing an intranet site for a large utility. These days everyone wants 'social networking" to be a part of what they do, but that doesn't ever seem to translate into anything more than a Twitter feed or link to a Facebook page. This book clearly details what is required to build a site with social networking characteristics. It itemises the building blocks, the content required and patterns that are required, to make your site hum along. My only criticism would be the excessive Yahoo references throughout - a little like listening to a one-eyed fan giving the broadcast commentary on their own team - but given this book is by Yahoo this is to be expected.