Designing Social Interfaces

Book excerpt: From the creators of Yahoo!'s Design Pattern Library, Designing Social Interfaces provides you with more than 100 patterns, principles, and best practices, along with salient advice for many of the common challenges you'll face when starting a social website. Designing sites that foster user interaction and community-building is a valuable skill for web developers and designers today, but it's not that easy to understand the nuances of the social web. Now you have help. Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone share hard-won insights into what works, what doesn't, and why. You'll learn how to balance opposing factions and grow healthy online communities by co-creating them with your users. Understand the overarching principles you need to consider for every website you create Learn basic design patterns for adding social components to an existing site Rein in misbehaving users on an active community site Build a social experience around a product or service and invite people to join Develop a social utility without having to build an entirely new infrastructure Enable users of your site's content to interact with one another Offer your members the opportunity to connect in the real world Learn to recognize and avoid antipatterns: emergent bad practices in the social network and social media space