Category: Patterns

  • Let there be music

    I’m embedding this Joe Russo’s Almost Dead show (which comes very highly recommended from musicologist Jake Cohen) into my blog here to illustrate how “badging out” works as an open strategy for distributing content socially:

  • Social Patterns II: The Social Interfacening…

    Social Patterns II: The Social Interfacening…

    It’s starting to feel like time to update ye old Designing Social Interfaces, so Erin Malone and I are talking to the kind editors at O’Reilly about doing a second edition. Because user experience, we are doing some research, including a survey. If you work with social interfaces, apps, websites, or experiences, please consider taking…

  • Designing Interfaces, second edition (by Jenifer Tidwell)

    Designing Interfaces, second edition (by Jenifer Tidwell)

    In Chapter 9 of the long-awaited new edition of Tidwell’s seminal Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design, she includes a kind shout-out to Designing Social Interfaces (on page 394, “What This Chapter Does Not Cover”).

  • Lisbon, here we come!

    The organizers of User Experience Lisbon have kindly invited me to come to Portugal next May (11-13), to teach a Designing Social Interfaces workshop. It looks like I’ll be in good company (this are just the folks they’ve announced so far):

  • Summit interview with Kent State’s Tom Froehlich

    When I was in Phoenix for the IA Summit this year, I had the privilege of sitting down with Tom Froehlich of Kent State University’s information department (with Valerie Kelly behind the camera) for a chat about IA, design patterns, social design, and more: They also spoke with Donna Spencer, Andrea Resmini, Andrew Hinton, Luke…

  • Designing for Play slides from WebVisions 2010

    Wow, WebVisions was amazing, as was Portland, and the hospitality of my friends there and the organizers of the conference. Thanks to everyone who made it possible! (I mean, Ukepalooza – say no more.) Here are the slides from my talk, Designing for Play:

  • A full schedule at WebVisions

    Arrived in Portland yesterday and did some prep for one of my gigs at WebVisions, the Ukepalooza set I’m playing with Bill DeRouchey as the duo “Cheeses & Tequila.” This morning Erin and I are teaching our Designing Social Interfaces workshop. Tomorrow is Ukepalooza, and then immediately afterward I’ll be doing my aptly named Designing…

  • 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…

  • Social design preso from Beyond Findability workshop presented by the IA Institute at the IA Summit

    Erin posted the latest version of our “5/5/5” talk, as given in Phoenix last week, to Slideshare: Designing Social Interfaces (presentation and gameplay), part of the IA Institute’s “Beyond Findability” workshop at IA Summit 2010 Also, Erin has also posted a blog entry on our poster shown at the Summit, on our evolving efforts to…

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

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

  • Back to BayCHI

    About two years ago in April I spoke at BayCHI for the first time. Rashmi Sinha, who was co-hosting the monthly program asked me to come speak about the Yahoo! Design Pattern library and the social patterns research project I had recently begun in earnest. It was my first time airing a lot of these…

  • 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.…

  • 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,…

  • 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…

  • 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.”