Category: Social Design

  • 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…

  • An essential guide to fostering online community

    Building Social Web Applicationsby Gavin BellO’Reilly (October, 2009) Gavin Bell draws on his extensive experience to offer a well structured guide to adding community elements to a website or application. His book will help any professional planning a social strategy, designing a set of social features, determining the types of relationships to foster among users,…

  • Are we doing any good?

    One of my favorite essays published in our book is Matte Scheinker’s, called Are we building a better Internet?. I asked Matte to write about ethics because it was a burning topic for the book and one that he and I used to kick around a bit as an oft-neglected issue in web design and…

  • 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…

  • Resisting the baroque temptation and design is harder than it looks, at BayCHI in February

    This coming February 9 is approximately my one-year anniversary as co-chair of BayCHI’s monthly program and so far I’m enjoying the responsibility a great deal, even with the occasional panic that sets in when each new cycle rolls around. The BayCHI Program for February features Elaine Wherry from Meebo and Jeff Green from EA. Elaine…

  • Your users are mental

  • 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…

  • Interview on the Well about Designing Social Interfaces

    This 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…

  • 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…

  • Slides from our mini-workshop at IDEA 2009

    Designing Social Interfaces: 5 steps, 5 principles, 5 anti-patternsView more presentations from erin malone.

  • Presenting social patterns to patternistas at PLoP

    Social Design For Patternistas View more documents from Christian Crumlish. 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…

  • Today's the last day to vote for my so-called SxSW panel

    Erin and I want to get a bunch of people together at South by Southwest in Austin next March to play SocialMania, the card game we’ve just started beta testing. If that sounds fun, go (sign up and) vote one snaps up for SocialMania: Designing Social Interfaces – The Game. Also, Dave Gray, myself, and…

  • 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…

  • The wheel of convos

    Pretty cool visualization of various types of social media platforms (based on a cyclical model of conversation). (via Nick Terry)

  • 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.

  • Porter's three problems of social software

    Excellent breakdown on how to obtain and sustain “traction” in social software design (the three problems are sign-up, first-time use, and ongoing engagement): Designing For Social Traction View more documents from Joshua Porter.

  • Bulletin article Boingboinged

    Cory Doctorow picked up on a brief mention from Bruce Sterling in his wired blog pointing to my recent bulletin article. Cory adds Stupid pitfalls of social media: This American Society for Information Science and Technology paper by Yahoo’s Christian Crumlish has a tidy little cosmology of dumb things that social media does. Commenters seem…

  • The Information Architecture of Social Experience Design: Five Principles, Five Anti-Patterns and 96 Patterns (in Three Buckets)

    I have an article in the August/September 2009 issue of The Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, called "The Information Architecture of Social Experience Design: Five Principles, Five Anti-Patterns and 96 Patterns (in Three Buckets)" (quite a mouthful, eh?). I’d like to thank Stacy Surla, one of my colleagues on the…