Designing Social Interfaces

Design

Designing social websites and applications, or adding a social dimension to an existing project, involves unique challenges beyond those associated with designing for individuals interacting alone with an interface. Do any of the following issues sound familiar?

• I'm a designer being asked to add "social" to my site!
• I have an active community on my site but people are misbehaving. How can I get that under control?
• We want to build a really cool social experience around [thingy] but we're not sure how to get people to come join the fun.
• I have a great idea for a social utility but I don't want to have to first re-create the social infrastructure of the web inside of it.
• People come and read my content, but they're invisible to each other. How can I peel away the layers so they can participate with each other?
• I'm worried I'm missing an opportunity to help my members connect with each other in the real world.

In this workshop, we'll address these challenges and more. You'll explore the landscape of social user experience design patterns and anti-patterns, focusing on the contexts in which specific interface designs work well and the unintended consequences of some interface choices that may seem like a good idea at first.

Starting with a foundational set of high-level practices, Christian will present rules and tips for how to mix and match specific design patterns create compelling social experiences.

Workshop activities will involve concept modeling and user interface sketching to explore the application of social interaction patterns to specific scenarios.

Who is this workshop for?

Designers, developers, architects and product specialists all need to work together to create compelling social experiences online and this workshop will be relevant to anyone who has to plan, design, build, or bring to market social websites and applications.

What will you learn?

• Understand, visualize, and communicate clearly about the social design landscape.
• Apply a set of core social design principles to a wide variety of contexts.
• Create models for the representation of people and social objects in your app.
• Add social features intelligently (and incrementally) to an existing site.
• Enable sharing and engage organic word-of-mouth growth to launch your project.
• Introduce representations of presence into an experience so that your users can find and relate to each other.
• Tie your virtual experiences to the real world in space and time by connecting to maps, geolocation, and calendaring tools.
• Figure out an enterprise social media strategy for your client, boss, or startup.

Playful Design

Taking ideas from game design, musical instrument design, and play-acting techniques including improv and bodystorming, Christian will address the role of play in digital experiences and how our designs can foster and encourage play rather than squeeze all the joy out of life one pixel at a time.

In game design, you create an arena for play. You establish boundaries and rules and you work to tune game dynamics that yield fun experiences rather than boring, mechanical, or pointless drudgery. Within those boundaries and rules, the players create their own unique experience, collaboratively, every time. Again the marriage of strict purposeful constraints with open space and room for human variation creates the best game experiences.

Children gravitate toward play-acting naturally but over time those skills can be lost. Giving people contexts in which they can explore alternate identities, wear masks, co-create stories, re-enact important events, or make snowmen and sandcastles can summon up that inner never-fully-lost capacity to enter a flow state.

Can an enterprise app, maybe one that looks like a spreadsheet and reports to HR ever actually be fun? That's a stretch, but you can absolutely introduce elements of play into the most buttoned-down context. Consider one primitive gesture from games: collecting. Many games offer some form of gather, arranging, and displaying objects. Just so, even an HR portal may offer some opportunity to incorporate a collecting "game" into the workflow.

Christian will share techniques for introducing a sense of play into the experiences we're designing and will exhort the assembled crowd to make life more fun for our users and to thrive while doing so.