Category: Gigs

  • Where I’m writing from

    When Apple brought the touch screen and the tablet together they kicked off a new revolution, one that moves us all one step closer to direct manipulation of the digital world at our hands. As a writer, I suppose I have naturally gravitated toward the realm of writing and editing, where we’re still following “word…

  • There's no 'I' in 'corporate brand' (or is there?)

    Jeff Gothelf has just published an article in Smashing Magazine on How to Maintain Your Personal Brand as a Corporate Employee. He interviewed me, as well as David Armano and Luke Wroblewski, while researching the article, and I’m quoted a few times in it. Here’s part of his conclusion: Be respectful of your employer and…

  • AOL?!? Really?

    Some thoughts on my first few days on my new job as a consumer experience evangelist at AOL, and what I hope to help the team here accomplish.

  • My Yahoo! years

    This post has turned out to be a lot more difficult to write than I expected. Last Tuesday was my final day at Yahoo! I wrote a valedictory post for the YDN blog as my official signoff. It wasn’t easy resigning from Yahoo! I started working there more than three years ago and had a…

  • Talking patterns, openness, and community with the Tummelvision crew

    Oh, cool! Heather posted the Tummelvision episode I appeared on a couple of weeks ago.

  • Tags as collecting behavior

    When I first started curating the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library, I put “tags” near the top of my list of user interaction patterns to investigate. By that time, Yahoo! had already acquired several pioneers in the tagging realm, Flickr and Delicious, and there were some subtle distinctions in how they implemented the experience. We got…

  • New navbar patterns in the Yahoo! library

    Over the past few months I conducted an audit of the patterns in Yahoo!’s internal design pattern library, with an eye toward publishing as many of them as possible in the open library at YDN. Why? Well, for one thing, to get more eyeballs on them, to gather more feedback and keep improving the patterns.…

  • Putting the social in the mobile

    My continuing series of blog posts linking to essays published in our book, well, continues now with Billie Mandel’s Designing Social Interfaces for Mobile, in which she writes: Contextually speaking, mobile phones are by definition social networking devices. Breaking out of the classic phone/phone book mental model and transforming that experience to include 21st century-style…

  • Talking social patterns with thriving UX communities in London and Berlin

    Talking social patterns with thriving UX communities in London and Berlin

    A week or so ago I undertook a whirlwind visit to the UK and the Continent, giving two presentations about design patterns and social design, one in London on Tuesday, and another in Berlin on Thursday, each event sponsored by YDN (and the one in Germany co-sponsored by the local IxDA group). The London event…

  • Your users are mental

  • New iPhone stencils for prototypers

    Interaction designer and prototyper Chris Stone recently volunteered to adapt the iPhone stencils in our OmniGraffle based stencil kit in the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library and optimize them for use in Adobe InDesign. Chris “created a customizable, vector-based iPhone stencil library for InDesign.” To make it he worked from the PDF version of the stencil…

  • New Presence patterns in the Yahoo! Pattern Library

    We just published two new social patterns in a new category, called Presence (under People), in the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library. The two patterns are Availability and Updates. The Design Pattern Library is a collection of guidelines for the design of online interactions that can aid decision-making and guide the work of web developers and…

  • Designing social interfaces at Web Directions South 2009

    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…

  • First YDN video podcast with Jonathan Leblanc

    Jonathan gives a few shout outs to the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library and my new book, Designing Social Interfaces. The best part is when the host says he considers the Yahoo! Developer Network to be “the unsung hero of the Internet.”

  • The book has arrived!

    the book has arrived! Originally uploaded by erin_designr We started our book proposal around June of ’08…

  • Yahoo! Design Pattern Library relaunches with 10 new social patterns

    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…

  • See me speak at IDEA 2009

    The IDEA Conference looks at the intersection of physical and information space and wonders how you design experiences for that. At IDEA we’ll combine a straightforward presentation of the ideas in Designing Social Interfaces with an interactive quasi-workshop activity involving play-testing a prototype card game we’re designing.

  • BT intent on his monitor

    BT intent, originally uploaded by xian. A snapshot of the evening entertainment last night at Yahoo! for the kickoff of the iPhoneDevCamp 3.

  • Designing Social Interfaces, Rough Cut edition now available from O'Reilly Media

    Designing Social Interfaces – Rough Cut | O’Reilly Media Originally uploaded by xian The unedited, 500 page first draft of our book is available now in PDF format for review by anyone who can’t bear to wait till September for the first (“real”) edition to come out. Yay!

  • Designing Social Interfaces Web 2.0 Expo workshop slides

    Social Patterns Talk – Web 2.0 version View more presentations from Erin Malone.

  • Slides from Designing Social Interfaces at IA Summit 2009

    Erin Malone and I introduced some of the fruit of our effort to carve out a pattern language for social user experience design. At the Information Architecture Summit in Memphis this past week we taught our pattern library workshop and then delivered this tandem presentation: Designing Social Interfaces View more presentations from Erin Malone.