Interview on the Well about Designing Social Interfaces

· Design, Information Architecture, Patterns, Social Design, User Experience

bluelogo144x60This week we’ve begun a two-week-long interview in the Well’s public Inkwell conference. The interview is being led by Jon Lebkowsky my friend and longtime co-host of the Well’s blog conference.

The cool thing about these interviews is that because they take two weeks and are published “live” they can cover a lot of interesting tangents, and so far Jon (along with Well denizens who’ve read the book, such as Brian Dear) has been asking me great, probing questions.

Gail Williams, an online community expert in her own right, has already quoted one of my throwaway lines:

“a filing cabinet has a user interface but a telephone is a social interface”

Even if you aren’t a member of the Well (and why aren’t you?), you can submit questions for the interview via [an email address that I'll track down and post here pronto].

Designing social interfaces at Web Directions South 2009

· Design, Patterns, Social Design, User Experience, Yahoo!

I had a great time presenting at Web Directions South 2009. J.J. Halans took some wonderful photos at the event, such as the one showing the Where’s Waldo slide (above) and this one (showing Erin’s awesome visualization behind me):

The slides by themselves are only part of the story of course but I’ve just posted them to slideshare (now synced with the audio podcast to make a “slidecast”):

Designing Social Interfaces at Web Directions South 2009

Here’s the video webcast that went out live on twitcam:

Here’s the podcast:

You may find Matt Balara’s sketchnotes (first page, second page) useful as well:

Or check out Daniel Bogan’s one-page sketchnotes!

Presenting social patterns to patternistas at PLoP

· Design, Events, Patterns, Social Design, User Experience

Social Design For Patternistas

Last week I was in Chicago for PLoP (Pattern Languages of Programs) 2009, co-located with the Agile conference. PLoP is a unique conference, in some ways more like a funky academic confab than a typical tech industry conference. Most of the time is spent in workshops, revising papers about patterns and reviewing small pattern collections. The rest of the time is spent debating fascinating philosophical questions and playing excellent ice-break games.

This year (my second PLoP) I presented an update on the social design patterns project geared towards people more familiar with the computer programming (aka “Gang of Four” or “Hillside”) design patterns, and then we workshopped chapter 3 of the book (the engagement design patterns).

Yahoo! Design Pattern Library relaunches with 10 new social patterns

· Design, Information Architecture, Patterns, Social Design, User Experience, Yahoo!

Over one year in the making…

The work of many hands…

A much overdue look-and-feel refresh, with some much-needed (if subtle) usability improvements…

I am bursting with pride that I’m able to announce today the relaunch of the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library with “ten new patterns, a reorganized category-structure, cleaner URLs for easier bookmarking, and much, much more.”

For more details on the update see Design Patterns, Now More Open and Social, my post today on the Yahoo! Developer Network blog.

I’ll be doing more blogging over there about our library, design patterns, social design, and Yahoo!’s open and social platforms, and I’ll post some deeper dives into some of the new features and polices at the library over the coming weeks.

One key point I don’t want to gloss over:

[W]e are moving to a much more open pattern review and revision process: We’ve added a new rating level for patterns called “Beta,” and we will use it to publish unfinished patterns and request comments on them from the larger community. The accordion pattern will be the first guinea pig for this process, as we already published a survey through the YUI blog to solicit community input.

Short Bio

Christian Crumlish leads product and ux teams to deliver amazing cross-channel experiences. He is director of product at CloudOn, co-chairs the monthly BayCHI program, and has been director of product for AIM, curator of the Yahoo design pattern library, and director of the Information Architecture Institute. He is the author of The Power of Many (Wiley) and co-author of Designing Social Interfaces (O’Reilly).

Resume / CV

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