One of my top priorities in my job as curator of Yahoo’s Design Pattern Library is to help polish up and publish to the wider web community a series of social-media oriented design patterns that our community platform team has been working on.
The first of this, Vote to Promote (a sort of generic “Digg This!” pattern) went live last week. There are more to come. The author of the pattern, Bryce Glass, has more to say about it in his blog, Soldier Ant, and I blogged about the pattern (and a new organizational scheme I’m trying out for the library, both the internal and open versions) at the Yahoo! User Interface Blog.
As always, we welcome feedback.
Comments
4 responses to “Pushing social patterns”
Hey Xian,
Have you noticed what they are doing over on the recently launched Satisfaction site? Each topic displays a widget similar in layout to Digg, but with very different functionality. The Satisfaction widget shows the number of replys and follwers, but clicking on it simply takes you to read the conversation. What do you think? Does this match the user’s expectation?
That’s a good question, Dan. I’ve just started playing with Satisfaction today, so I haven’t had a chance to really analyze the interface. Also, my sense is they will be iterating it rapidly based on feedback.
Aside: the overall idea seems wicked cool, potentially revolutionary. Since I interviewed Craig Newmark several times for the Power of Many it’s been clear to me that customer service is the secret sauce that’s hiding in plain site for most organizations. “Opening” the whole conversation (in the cluetrain/conversations are markets sense) seems like a real step forward.
So, back to first impressions. I didn’t really see that little scorecard as a voting widget. I was a bit confused by the “follower” model, as it seems to b based on questions by the person being followed and not on the twitter/pownce model of following a person wholesale. There also seems to be no explicit friending which is probably for the best.
Dude, referencing this could have added so much credibility to my yet unrealized “mVite” concept (grassroots viral marketing to bring small businesses to the Mueller neighborhood in Austin).
*Not to be confused with mvite.com or the zillion other projects that used this obvious name.
Sorry it wasn’t available in time! We actually do a lot of review and refinement on these patterns before pushing them to the open library. I’m impatient too!