Designing Social Experiences

Designing for social interaction is hard. People are unpredictable, consistency is a mixed blessing, and co-creation with your users requires a dizzying flirtation with loss of control. We will present the dos and don’ts of social web design using a sampling of interaction patterns, design principles and best practices to help you improve the design of your digital social environments.

Designing social websites and applications, or adding a social dimension to an existing project, entails unique challenges way beyond those involved in creating experiences for individuals interacting alone with an interface. Any of the following sound familiar?

I’m a designer being asked to add “social” or “gamification” to my site!
I have an active community on my site but people are misbehaving. How can I get that under control?
We want to build a really cool social experience around [thingy] but we’re not sure how to get people to come join the fun.
I have a great idea for a social utility but I don’t want to have to first re-create the social infrastructure of the web inside of it.
People come and read my content, but they’re invisible to each other. How can I peel away the layers so they can participate with each other?
I’m worried I’m missing an opportunity to help my members connect with each other in the real world.
I need to design a mobile companion to our site and it need to be more social. Where do I start?
In this workshop, we’ll address these challenges and more. You’ll explore the landscape of social user experience design patterns and anti-patterns, focusing on the contexts in which specific interface designs work well and the unintended consequences that make some UI ideas seem like a good idea until they turn around and bite you in your app.

Starting with a foundational set of high-level practices that underpin the individual interaction, Erin and Christian will present rules and tips for how to mix-and-match the individual social patterns and best practices to create compelling social experiences. Workshop activities will involve group discussions and sketching to explore the application of social interaction patterns to specific scenarios.

Who is this workshop for?
Designers, developers, architects and product specialists all need to work together to create compelling social experiences online and this workshop will be relevant to anyone who has to plan, design, build, or bring to market social websites and applications.
What will you learn?
By the end of this very full day you will be able to:

understand, visualize, and communicate clearly about the social design landscape
apply a set of core social design principles to a wide variety of contexts
create models for the representation of people and social objects in your app
add social features intelligently (and incrementally) to an existing site
design reputation features to enable the type of community (competitive? collaborative? somewhere in between?) you want
enable sharing and engage organic word-of-mouth growth to launch your project
embrace openness and leverage the existing open social infrastructure of the web
introduce representations of presence into an experience so that your users can find and relate to each other
tie your virtual experiences to the real world in space and time by connecting to maps, geolocation, and calendaring tools
figure out an enterprise social media strategy for your client, boss, or startup