Designing Social Interfaces: Principles, Patterns, and Practices for Improving the User Experience

by Christian Crumlish, Erin Malone

Knowing how to create a social website to foster user interaction and community building is becoming a core skill for developers and designers today, but grasping the nuances of the social web is much harder than it appears. With more than 100 patterns, principles, and best practices, this book presents practical design solutions that you can use immediately to create or improve a social website interface.

Written by the creators of Yahoo!'s Pattern Library, Designing Social Interfaces shares hard-won insights into what works, what doesn't, and why. That includes salient advice for many of the common challenges designers and developers face when building social websites. This book will help you:

Learn basic design patterns for adding a social element to an existing site Rein in misbehaving users on an active community site Build a social experience around a product or service, and invite people to join Develop a social utility without having to build an entirely new infrastructure Enable users of your site's content to interact with one another Offer your members the opportunity to connect with each other in the real world

The book also exposes antipatterns: emergent bad practices in the social network and social media space. Designing Social Interfaces shows you how to balance opposing forces and grow healthy online communities by co-creating them with your users.

Genres: Design, Nonfiction, Programming, Technology, Business, Web, Social Media

429 pages, ebook

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Christian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Since I co-wrote it, I'll resist rating it.

[SALEM · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is full of joy for someone like me who is very addict to Social internet. Also it is very useful for those who are tide to design a social network as a complete reference.

Two points that I am seriously recommend this book for any one are:
- It literally covers all the topics and issues about Social Networks.
- For someone who hardly find a time for reading like me, or someone on rush to find information about a specific topic, this book will let you get in the point and get all answers related to (What, Why, Who, How, ...) and so on. You don't have to read too long paragraphs to get the point, you just need to read the needed information in the form of points, which by the why will boost the rate of getting what you need. And sure all examples in the screen shots of the very familiar sites we are using in our daily life, it is another magnificent asset while reading.

finally as people who are working on this project are Yahoo-guys or something like that, I am totally trust their knowledge!



Merged review:

This book is full of joy for someone like me who is very addict to Social internet. Also it is very useful for those who are tide to design a social network as a complete reference.

Two points that I am seriously recommend this book for any one are:
- It literally covers all the topics and issues about Social Networks.
- For someone who hardly find a time for reading like me, or someone on rush to find information about a specific topic, this book will let you get in the point and get all answers related to (What, Why, Who, How, ...) and so on. You don't have to read too long paragraphs to get the point, you just need to read the needed information in the form of points, which by the why will boost the rate of getting what you need. And sure all examples in the screen shots of the very familiar sites we are using in our daily life, it is another magnificent asset while reading.

finally as people who are working on this project are Yahoo-guys or something like that, I am totally trust their knowledge!

[Tom Olson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Originally submitted at O'Reilly

When I purchased this book I was hoping to get a better grasp on common social interface patterns and their usage. I wanted to build better autocomplete tools so users could more readily find users and connections, or learn better ways to organize groups of users so they'd be easier to find and isolate in an interface. While this book has given me descriptive patterns and current examples of those patterns, I still felt like it missed giving me the insight I was really looking for. I felt like this book focused much more on presenting the patterns than it focused on keeping the interfaces engaging.

On the other hand, it is a useful book of definitions and patterns. The simple naming makes it easy to take a unknown description and map it to one of the pattern. I also appreciate that the book breaks down a pattern into "What", "Use When", "How", "Why", "Related patterns" and "As seen on". The "How" section provides a good sanity check for added features. This section gently reminds you that you can, for instance, add subscriptions or saved searches to a social search, and other minor things that you may not initially consider when trying to implement a pattern for the first time.

All in all, I find this book to be a decent purchase, and a good reference tool when I need it. This book would probably work best for the person that has real problems designing social interfaces. Maybe if you have to constantly redesign or deal with unhappy customers, this book would help you focus on stabilizing your interface.

[Ash Moran · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book labels itself as "Principles, Patterns, and Practices", but primarily it's a pattern library. I've come to this knowing very little about social media and social networks, so my review is a newbie perspective.

The book documents patterns of social UIs extensively. Most of the examples are from a small set of high-profile sites, with a bias towards Yahoo (due to being authored there). Patterns range in scope from the almost invisible (Welcome Page, Avatar, Sign In) to ones so complex whole applications are based around them (Calendar, Groups). All of them come with implementation recommendations and lessons learnt from history.

By "Practices", the authors mean "Best Practices". Or, "do what we tell you because it's better than making it up as you go along". The book has relatively little debate, and therefore is very accessible for beginners, but might not have enough to engage experts. (The flipside is that it gives a common language both ends of the community can use.)

Despite being largely prescriptive, there was enough background, history and opinion in this to keep me engaged. Interesting topics given brief essays include: identity management; influence of competitive patterns (eg Leaderboard) on community dynamics; the nature/effect of relationships between "staff" and the community; new open social network standards (eg OpenSocial); and the facets of being "open".

Overall, a great introduction, and a very handy reference to evaluate social sites.

[Dhuaine · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is just a pattern library with next to no discussion on the topic. The patterns are familiar and common sense to anyone who has used social web. Each pattern is presented with very short description, "when to use" recommendation and some examples, mostly from the same subset of sites. For me, the examples were most interesting; although I felt that the book would have been better if it included some examples of bad implementation and anti-patterns as well.

All in all, I learned only a few new things, mostly about services I haven't used myself. I'm not sure who this book is targeted at - absolute beginners? Designers running out of ideas and deadlines and looking for some inspiration or a quick fix? Either way, it's not a book you would read from cover to cover if you're using the web to do more than just check email.

[Sandro · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very well-written book, filled with explicative design patterns related to social interfaces and numerous known examples in the form of website images.

For experienced interface designers or even for some of the most observant web users, the patterns presented in this book may come across as obvious.

However, that's why they are called patterns—they are the most well-known common practices in the field compiled in one book.

I highly recommend this book. Even if people don't read it from start to finish, it still serves as a great reference book to have on your shelves, ready for you to consult a particular design pattern at any time.

[Rose · Rating 3 out of 5]

Obviously, this is a good reference for those who want create social apps. On the other thought, all aplications are meant to be used by humans who are by nature social. So I believe, this is a good beginner's book.

I considered it as beginners. If you've been a long time social web app user, the ideas presented here are not that surprising.

[Dave · Rating 3 out of 5]

This one is mostly common sense for anyone who's used more than a few social oriented services. It does a good job though breaking down features across all of these sites into single unit functions that can be helpful in communicating about social features. Worth a skim through if you're starting a social project.

[Nathanael Coyne · Rating 3 out of 5]

A useful resource. Not a book you would read cover to cover but still packed with plenty of ideas, guidance and examples for the interaction designer working with social websites.

[Alexander Debkaliuk · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is more of a catalogue of patterns way too familiar to anyone in the industry. I didn't really see much value in it. Could be written by anybody else.