Preface

Why We Updated This Book

WE WROTE AND DECIDED TO UPDATE THIS BOOK BECAUSE WE NEEDED A BOOK LIKE THIS, and we knew there wasn’t one on the market yet. Our own pattern collection, documentation, and arrangement of social user experience interface design patterns grew large and complex enough that we felt it warranted a book-length treatment. We wrote this book to build on the work we were doing at Yahoo! several years ago, and the work of the social design community at large. We wanted to propose a large macro-landscape for organizing and discussing these interaction patterns and to help build a consensus on a common language and set of conventions for discussing social design. We wrote this book because every web designer and developer in the world today is being asked to consider the social dimension of their work, and we wanted to help. We updated the book because in the five years since the first edition, social experience design has evolved—some things that looked like patterns haven’t stood the test of time, and some new potential patterns have emerged. Beyond that, mobile has become a major part of the lexicon and new patterns and ways of interacting have become part of the landscape.

What This Book Is About

This book is not about designing social behaviors, although many of the interactions are either dependent on or drive specific social behaviors. Many of the principles in the first section of this book talk about different kinds of user behavior, but are best considered across the landscape of the entire pattern collection.

This book is about interaction design, specifically designing social interactions and interfaces on the Web and in mobile environments. The collection of patterns is a distillation of many years of experience in designing social and community products for the Web and mobile devices that have led us to define this set of best practices, principles, and patterns for social interfaces. We focus on consumer-facing interactions, primarily because that’s where our experience lies. We have expanded the enterprise and mobile coverage; remember that all the patterns can be applied in the enterprise and in devices, provided the problems and solutions are viewed with the appropriate lens and set of constraints.

This collection is emerging, evolving, and continues to grow with time and technical innovations.

The Visual Examples

In the first edition, we referred to Yahoo! in many examples because we had developed many of the patterns in the context of designing products and features across the Yahoo! network. The patterns were tried and tested across hundreds of millions of users. In the second edition, we have tried to include visual examples from many sources around the Internet to illustrate the interactions of various patterns (and pieces of patterns), and to leverage the past several years of experience and growth across the social landscape of software. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so wherever possible, we try to show how something can be accomplished instead of just talking about it.

How This Book Is Organized

This book is organized into five parts. The first introduces the concept of user interface design patterns and outlines some high-level principles for social design that we believe inform all the subsequent patterns. The next three parts each introduce a major cluster of related patterns, grouped together by theme. The final part explores some emerging considerations that have not yet attained the status of patterns but warrant close attention.

Part I: What Are Social Patterns?

In Chapter 1, we lay out exactly what we mean when we’re talking about patterns in the design of interfaces for social user experiences and how to work with them. In Chapter 2, we cover some of the broad, overarching principles that can make the difference between a successful, thriving online community and a ghost town.

Part II: I Am Somebody

One of the building blocks of social experiences are representations of individual people in the system. Just as in Monopoly®, each “player” needs a “token” that represents him in the “game.” Chapter 3 explores how to engage users and get them to register for and sign into your service, thus establishing the beginnings of a new “self” in your system. Chapter 4 offers patterns for the representation of an individual identity, using things such as profiles and avatars. Chapter 5 discusses ways to indicate presence and show people in your application who else is there. Chapter 6 presents a family of reputation patterns that can help encourage the sort of behaviors you wish to foster.

Part III: The Objects of Our Desire

This is the largest chunk of the book, where we get into the actual behaviors that people engage in online and introduce the concept of social objects: those “conversation pieces” that anchor and give meaning to social interactions online. Chapter 7 addresses how people may collect objects in your application. Chapter 8 looks at how sharing and gift-giving work. Chapter 9 presents interfaces for publishing and broadcasting found objects and original content. Chapter 10 examines techniques for enabling people to give one another feedback on their contributions. Chapter 11 talks about communication and how it is bound to social objects. Chapter 12 looks at collaboration and how people can work together to create and evolve shared objects. Chapter 13 takes a step back to discuss larger social media ecosystems and interfaces that help people make sense of them.

Part IV: A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

The third cluster of patterns addresses relationships and the communities that can grow out of them. Chapter 14 examines relationship terminology and models of reciprocity or asymmetry, and how to enable users to find one another and form and declare relationships. Chapter 15 presents interfaces for community management and moderation, and models for collaborative filtering. Chapter 16 explores how to enable people to meet one another in the real world and create shared events.

Part V: Closed and Open Social Networks

In the final part, we approach the leading edge of social design and discuss some of the considerations you may encounter there. In Chapter 17, we look at many models of openness and the benefits and consequences of embracing them in your social architecture. In Chapter 18, we look to social in the enterprise.

Just as we have approached the collection of patterns as both authors and as curators of information from many sources, we have curated a collection of different voices from around the Internet to share alternative opinions, more in-depth exploration, and thoughts about social user behavior that provide seasoning around the patterns in each chapter. Look for continued conversations on these topics on our wiki and on the individual essayists’ personal blogs.

Who Should Read This Book

Anyone involved in building social interactions will be interested in this book.

User experience and interaction designers will find the detailed interaction patterns useful in their arsenal of tools. Product managers will appreciate the checklist and a thorough airing of pros, cons, and consequences of applying a pattern.

The explanations in the patterns and the related principles will provide the designer with a full spectrum of details to consider when making decisions for designing the social experience. The patterns don’t always prescribe how to design the thing, but they will offer up everything the designer needs to think about when designing, as well as what trade-offs may need to be made to design a great experience given a specific business and audience context.

Although this book does not go into technical details of how to build these interfaces, the web developer will appreciate the patterns, as they can be mapped to specific code solutions and provide the “why” behind design decisions.

Everyone on the product team will benefit from this book, as it provides a common vocabulary around social interactions and offers rich explanations and real-world examples that can benefit team discussions and communication.

Using the Interaction Patterns

You can read this book cover to cover. It’s arranged with a narrative flow in which ideas build on one another, but we designed it to work just as well as a reference. You can zero in on a particular section of interest or just read about a specific interface pattern, exploring related concepts through cross-references and the index.

This book is here to help you get your job done. In general, you may use the patterns in this book in your programs and documentation. Not all patterns should be used for every application; different ideas and social objects will require different solutions. Ideally, you will sample from each of the categories, adding more complex features and concepts as the community grows and you learn what is useful for its needs. We believe that the entire collection gives context to the social landscape and provides information about what types of things you should consider as you are making design decisions.

You do not need to contact us for permission unless you’re reproducing a significant portion of the text of the patterns. For example, creating a pattern repository that uses several patterns or excerpts of patterns from this book does not require permission. Selling or distributing a CD-ROM of examples from O’Reilly books does require permission. Answering a question by citing this book and quoting the patterns does not require permission. Incorporating a significant amount of pattern material from this book into your product’s documentation does require permission.

We appreciate, but do not require, attribution. An attribution usually includes the title, author, publisher, and ISBN, for example, “Designing Social Interfaces, by Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone. Copyright 2015. 978-1-491-91985-9.”

What Comes with This Book

This book has a companion website (http://designingsocialinterfaces.com) that offers an open forum for conversation around the patterns presented here; an addendum containing updated examples; additional thoughts about emerging patterns and principles; and helpful links to articles, resources on designing social interfaces, and discussions on specific topics touched on in this book by us or our many guest essayists.

All the book’s diagrams and figures are available under a Creative Commons license for you to download and use in your presentations. You’ll find them at Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/photos/socialpatterns/sets).

How to Contact Us

Please address comments and questions concerning this book to the publisher:

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Acknowledgments

We’d like to thank Mary Treseler at O’Reilly, who initially acquired the manuscript from us, helped us develop the outline and voice for the book, and shepherded us through the publishing process, encouraging and gently nudging us all along the way. I think it’s fair to say that without her support and guidance we would not have been able to pull this off. The consummate editor, Mary was really a pleasure to work with.

For the First Edition

Sanders Kleinfeld answered our endless anxious questions about DocBook and XML that failed to validate even when we yelled at it.

Rachel Monaghan steered us crisply through production and Genevieve d’Entremont copyedited a prodigious mound of pages in a shockingly brief amount of time, somehow paying close attention to subtle inconsistencies, cross-references, and infelicities of style. Jacque Quann helped us track the contract terms and shake loose the advance checks (yay).

Havi Hoffman, of Mozilla, who managed Yahoo! Press at the time of the first edition, worked a lot of behind-the-scenes magic to incubate and nurture the original book deal through an elaborate process. She made some of the earliest suggestions about doing a book of this kind and kept the relationship among the authors (one a Yahoo! employee, the other not), the publisher, and the imprint on a healthy footing. Dan Brodnitz of Lynda.com (http://lynda.com) offered helpful advice and coaching in the initial proposal phases of the project.

Thanks to Matt Leacock and Bryce Glass, earlier collaborators on this project and the Yahoo! Social Media Toolkit that was one of its ancestors, and ongoing contributions (Matt helping to design a social patterns card game with us and Bryce contributing the drafts of the reputation patterns and some visualizations of the entire social design landscape).

Thanks to Bill Scott from Paypal, Abby Kirigin then of Tipjoy, Adina Levin then of SocialText, and Paul Kroft from MITRE, who reviewed the first draft of the manuscript for technical and market viability and offered detailed, thorough feedback and suggestions that consistently improved the quality of the book.

For the Second Edition

The second edition was born over glasses of wine at the Information Architecture Summit in Baltimore last year, when Mary Treseler sat us down to discuss how much the social web had evolved in the past six years. Once again we benefited from her insight and focus and unique perspective surveying the digital design landscape.

Nick Lombardi, our acquisitions editor, helped get the whole revision project on track and ushered us through the planning stage and the initial few chapters.

Angela Rufino, our developmental editor, did an amazing job of shepherding our updated manuscript, conferring with us on tricky questions, and talking us through the inevitable tough spots. What a pleasure working with you, Angela. Thanks!

Thanks to Kate Rutter, UX Instructor and Visual Thinking Consultant at Intelleto; Laura Klein, the author of UX for Lean Startups (O’Reilly); and Matthew Russell, CTO of Digital Reasoning. Thanks to the flourishing community of UX designers and strategists we’re connected to—via Twitter, the IA Institute, the IxDA, LinkedIn, Facebook, blogs, ‘zines, and plenty of face-to-face events—who collectively encouraged us as we were writing this book, offered feedback on wiki drafts, linked to our project, asked for advice, interviewed us, and generally helped make writing the book itself a social experience.

With the (tough but fair!) technical reviews done, Melanie Yarbrough, our production editor, took the reins and guided us through the remaining copyediting, revision, proofreading, and quality checking. Her steady hand made the whole thing a breeze.

Our copyeditor, Bob Russell (of Octal Publishing), did a marvelous job making our prose sound its best and threw in the occasional personal observation to give us a smile or raise our spirits. What a pleasure. We highly recommend him.

Dianne Russell, our project manager at Octal kept the trains running on time with a cheerful, professional manner.

The whole process was smooth as silk, and that’s not always true in the book business!

From Christian

I’d like to thank Briggs, who knew what she was getting into when I agreed to write a book in my “copious spare time” and through both forbearance and numerous small kindnesses, made it possible for me to take on this ambitious effort.

My collaborator, Erin Malone, has been by far the best coauthor I’ve ever partnered with, but even before this project came into being, Erin mentored me, recruited me to curate the Yahoo! Pattern Library, encouraged my exploration of social design patterns, and gamely agreed to come on board to help write the book. Through thick and thin, Erin has been the mainstay of this project and a wonderful person to work with.

I’d like to thank George Oates, the original designer for Flickr, who sat down with me for a couple of hours over a nice long lunch, talking about the fundamental principles of social design as she sees it and has lived it. Much of the content of Chapter 2 and insights sprinkled throughout the book found their genesis in that conversation.

Elizabeth Churchill from Yahoo! Research also helped me clarify my thinking on a number of related topics over the course of several wide-ranging conversations. The organizers of BarCamp Block in Palo Alto in October of 2007 provided a great environment for brainstorming the original “tree of patterns” that evolved into this book. Many of the patterns identified that day survived into the latest version of the taxonomy. Likewise, the organizers of BayCHI’s monthly program and Ignite SF also provided opportunities to rehearse some of the ideas about social patterns, social anti-patterns, antisocial patterns, and so on, over a series of presentations.

I’d like to thank my family and friends who also cut me a great deal of slack as I became incommunicado, at best, and irritable, at worst.

I’d also like to thank Micah Laaker, who ran the user experience design team for the Yahoo! Open Strategy (where I worked at the time of the first edition) and contributed an essay on openness.

Among our essayists, I’d also like to single out Matte Scheinker, a mentor to me while he was still at Yahoo! and contributor of a nuanced essay on the ethical implications of this type of design work.

In the years since the first edition, I’ve launched blogs for Patch; directed the messaging products team at AOL (working on AIM, one of the grandparents of online presence); directed the product team at CloudOn, an enterprise productivity startup since sold to Dropbox where we facilitated collaboration in the workspace; and am now head of product at 7 Cups of Tea (7cups.com) where we are building a social environment and community founded on compassion and support.

In each of these roles I’ve continued to learn a lot about how people are adapting to online social connectivity, and my teachers have included Matte Scheinker (again) and Jason Shellen at AOL, Jay Zaveri at CloudOn, and all my colleagues at 7 Cups.

From Erin

When we wrote the first edition of the book, there were so many excellent people who shared our ride and contributed to the formation and evolution of the content—the platform design team, the amazing researchers across the company, the community development and product teams, and a host of other folks at Yahoo!—thanks to you all who were instrumental in helping develop and test many of the concepts we talked about in the first edition of the book.

In the five years that have passed, the expanding user experience design community and the many companies and startups that have taken our patterns, mixed them and matched them, challenged them and built on them and created new ways of thinking—you have inspired me in both my everyday work as a UX designer and in pulling this new material together. So many of you are nameless and faceless to me, but I thank each and every one of you for pushing the boundaries of this work, helping me see new ways of doing things, and inspiring the next wave of social experiences.

I want to thank, again, my business partners, Bruce Charonnat and James Young for being open and flexible with my time while working on this update. Thanks to my clients who tolerated my distractedness as I was thinking about patterns and for the opportunities over the last five years to really push my thinking especially around Identity, Privacy, Registration, New User Experiences, Reputations, Ratings and Reviews, and other aspects of developing a good social experience.

Thanks to Christina Wodtke for challenging me to write on a regular basis; she has taught me so much about how writing is fun and good for my soul. Thanks, also, for often inviting me to her classroom to teach her students the basics of social experience design and to play the game.

Thanks to all the workshop participants over the last five years for helping test the game, for questioning what I’ve been teaching and helping to refine and recraft what makes a good social experience. You all never cease to amaze me with the crazy ideas developed in the process. I want to create a company with all of you and release these ideas out into the world.

To our essayists

Thanks to all our essayists from the first edition for reviewing their essays and providing updates or new thoughts for the revision.

Many thanks to Bryce Glass, our unsung third author, for his expertise on Reputation systems and the reputation patterns, and for writing two essays for us.

To Randy Farmer, for his excellent thinking on Identity from all perspectives and his core set of “open” patterns.

To danah boyd, for encouraging Erin to go foraging through her wonderful thesis document and allowing us to excerpt it in our section on Youth.

To Billie Mandel—thank you so much for your excellent advice on designing for Mobile, which readers can find on our website.

To Stuart French, for his expertise in social knowledge management in the enterprise environment.

To Joshua Porter, for paving the way with his book, Designing for the Social Web, and for graciously adding his thoughts to our book.

To Thomas Vander Wal, for thinking about the future in his essay on social metadata.

To Chris Fahey, skeptic, coach, and friend, for his essay distinguishing patterns from cliches.

To Tom Hughes-Croucher, YDN evangelist colleague and deep thinker on social application design, for his thoughts on users’ mental models.

To Matt Jones, inspiring pioneer and gifted communicator, for his elaboration on the intriguing palimpsest metaphor he contributed to this body of thought.

To Leisa Reichelt, pioneer of open design processes and sharp theorist, for expanding on her ambient intimacy coinage.

To Andrew Hinton, information philosopher, advanced practitioner, and community leader, for his illumination of the problems of context in these new environments.

To Derek Powazek, trailblazer of community-oriented design and communication, for his exploration of people as meaning-making machines.

To Harjeet S. Gulati, who found our project through the wiki, added a wealth of definitions and other useful contributions there, and then consented to contribute his thoughts on knowledge management in the enterprise.

To Gary Burnett, who has been studying and publishing about online community dynamics from an information science perspective, for his findings on the establishment of social norms.

To Shara Karasic, accomplished professional community moderator, for her deeply useful, hard-won tips about fostering a thriving community online.

To Micah Laaker, design leader on the identity team at Google, for his enumeration of 13 types of openness.

To Robyn Tippins, founder at Mariposa Marketing, for her insights on the community-building trifecta.

Without the work of the numerous thinkers, designers, builders, and schemers who have been mapping the digital social product space for the past decade or more (cited for further reading throughout the book)—notably, Ward Cunningham, Howard Rheingold, Amy Jo Kim, Dave Winer, Marc Canter, David Weinberger, Gene Smith, Clay Shirky, Mary Hodder, Stewart Butterfield, Edward Vielmetti, Kevin Marks, Tom Coates, Jeremy Keith, Allen Tom, Brian Oberkirch, Liz Lawley, Lane Becker, Susan Mernit, Tara Hunt and many, many others—we could not have written this book. This is decidedly an effort in sense-making and organization, an attempt to give the community at the very least a straw model that tries to wrap its metaphorical arms around the entire landscape of social interaction design.

To our new essayists—welcome to the family

To Paul Adams, VP Product at Intercom, researcher and author, for the excellent research on groups and for sharing the thinking behind what works and doesn’t work when designing for managing one’s network, based on his analysis of his experience working as a designer on Google+.

To Josh Clark, whose thoughts on mobile design have paved the way for us all to go to the next level and think more holistically about all the spaces within which we dwell.

To Samuel Hulick, who has been publishing breakdowns and constructive critique of the most popular products’ new user experiences and onboarding practices, and in the process, creating a wealth of information for others to learn from and be inspired by when thinking about their customers.

To our reviewers

Thank you so much for taking the time to read the book in detail and for being open and honest with what works for you and what doesn’t. We heard you and spent a fair amount of time recrafting portions to better clarify and explain our intent.

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