Idea2009: Social Design Patterns
Breaking it out into multiple blog posts because summarizing 5 talks in one go is a lot to digest.
Social Design Patterns
- Presented by Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone
- Designing for social experiences is more compplicated than interface design. Human computer interaction is lonely-you have a human, a computer, and interface between them. What about other people?
- You can control an interface, set the stage, environment, boundaries, rules, but you can’t control how people will interact with each other.
- Let your users finish your design for you; change the rules if need be.
- 5 steps:
- Give people a way to be identified so that other people can find them. E.g. aliases
- Have objects that people can claim and talk about. E.g. pokemon
- Give people something to do, the activity design patterns. E.g. 1-1 sharing, broadcasting, feedback, collaboration. Note that conversation is facilitated by the social object.
- Enable a bridge to real-life events. Enable users to bring online experiences offline, and offline experiences online again. It lives and enriches the online product.
- Let the community elevate people and content they value.
- 5 principles:
- Pave the cowpaths: observe how people behave then facilitate what people want to do; support their behaviour, don’t restrict them. Users aren’t stupid for trying to do something your system doesn’t support.
- Talk like a person: there’s no use hiding behind a site; we know websites are built by people. Set the tone: we’re humans, we’re friendly; avoid legalese and defensive talk.
- Be open, play well with others. Let data be taken from your system, and integrate external data to add value. Lego is the standard! Help build the web, as opposed to building a ship inside a bottle.
- Learn from games: playfulness, rewards and punishments; use appropriate currencies.
- Respect the ethical dimension: when you ask for private information, you are making an commitment, implicit or explicit, to keep it safe. Be conscience of what you’re doing and the consequences of how you use the information given to you. Ask: Am I tricking people, or am I giving them a good reason to trust me?
- 5 anti-patterns:
- Cargo-cult: you can’t steal or copy and interface unless you understand all the factors and conditions that went into the decisions that were made for the product to be successful. It may not apply to you.
- Don’t break email: users have habits, they come to expect things (if notifications come to their emails, they should be able to respond to them via email); leverage what you know about your users memories and experiences
- The anti-password: it doesn’t make sense for users to have the same identify on two different sites when there’s no good reason, e.g. avoid trolls. Make use of other tools like OpenId and Facebook Connect.
- The Ex-boyfrirend bug. The “people you should know list” on Facebook is actually the people you hate list. There may be good reason why two people aren’t friends even though they have 54 friends in common.
- Potemkin Village. When you first set up a system, there is a great temptation to build a complex taxonomy from the get go. Let your users to decide what the separation should be and when it should be made. If you have too many buckets, even if you have enough people to fill them, they won’t be able to find each other. Let people organize themselves.