Designing Social Interfaces
Last night I went to a great talk by Christian Crumlish from Yahoo! about design patterns - specifically design patterns for the social web. It was basically an hour long ad for the book he’s written called Designing Social Interfaces but I didn’t mind because it was actually very informative and entertaining.
He ran through the history of design patterns, from the book A Pattern Language which was written by architect Christopher Alexander in 1977 as an attempt to demystify and democratise architecture through to Design Patterns which is considered to be a seminal text for programmers (if you know what MVC means it came from that book) and Designing Interfaces which is the book that took the pattern based approach to designing user interfaces and inspired the excellent Yahoo! Pattern Library of which he is now curator specialising in social interaction patterns for the modern web.
He introduced the five underlying principles of social web design
- Pave the cowpaths
- Talk like a person
- Play well with others
- Learn from games
- Respect the ethical dimension
then explained some key steps to creating community,
- Give people a way to be identified
- Give people a way to distinguish themselves from others
- Give people something to do
- Enable a bridge to real life events
- Let the community elevate people & content they value
talked about the patterns in the book and gave some examples of “anti-patterns” to avoid.
- Cargo Cult
- Don’t break email
- The Password Anti-Pattern
- The Ex-Boyfriend Bug
- Potemkin Village
Excellent talk. Even though I knew quite a lot of what he was talking about and have put it into practice a number of times it was really very good to hear someone talking about these things in such an engaging way.
There’s a great wiki to support the book but I think I’m going to pick up a copy anyway. I’d also be really interested to have a look at the card game he’s developed called Social Mania.
In the Q&A afterward I got an attack of the nerves but I wanted to ask this question. It’s based on a comment Adam Greenfield made at a talk I saw recently - and I’ve been thinking about it a lot.
“Given the fact that people that design websites tend to be (lets face it) slightly obsessive, often with social difficulties of their own we can’t ignore the fact that most of the early social developments online possibly stemmed from these people needing to design less stressful ways of communicating with others. With that in mind don’t you think the core of some of these concepts - things like explicitly declaring your friendship with someone are a little odd? Do you think these patterns are ossifying ideas like ‘friends lists’ when we should really be investigating more human ways to deal with social connections?”
I should have asked it. I might have got a free book.
Photo by Halans on Flickr.
