Workshop: Christian Crumlish - Designing social interfaces October 5, 2009

Designing social websites and applications or adding a social dimension to an existing project entails its own unique challenges way beyond those involved in creating experiences for individuals interacting alone with an interface. Any of the following 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 full-day 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 that make some UI ideas seem like a good idea until they turn around and bite you in your app.

Starting with a foundational set of high-level practices that underpin the individual interaction, Christian will present rules and tips for how to mix-and-match the individual social patterns and best practices to 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?
By the end of this very full day you will be able to

* 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
* design reputation features to enable the type of community (competitive? collaborative? somewhere in between?) you want
* enable sharing and engage organic word-of-mouth growth to launch your project
* embrace openness and leverage the existing open social infrastructure of the web
* 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

About Christian Crumlish
Christian Crumlish has been participating in, analyzing, designing, and drawing social interactive spaces online since 1994. These days he is the curator of Yahoo!’s pattern library, a design evangelist with the Yahoo! Developer Network, and a member of Yahoo!’s Design Council. He is the author of the bestselling The Internet for Busy People, and The Power of Many, and is currently working on an upcoming book, Designing Social Interfaces, with Erin Malone. He has spoken about social patterns at BarCamp Block, BayCHI, South by Southwest, the IA Summit, Ignite, and Web 2.0 Expo. Christian has a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Princeton. He lives in Oakland with his wife Briggs, his cat Fraidy, and his electric ukulele, Evangeline.