Good books. Designing Social Interfaces.

November 22nd, 2009 • Books

‘Designing Social Interfaces’ is a new book by Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone about patterns, principles, and best practices in social interface design. It’s great compendium for all Art Directors, UX designers or concept developers who are or in the process to set up something which will be digital and social. Or to put it another way: It’s a great read for pretty much everyone who works as a creative in any digital driven agency.

Most people who work as creatives in a digital agency or as freelancers know the problem: Certain challenges will haunt you for the rest of your life. They simply return again, again and again. Let’s take i.e. a registration form. You won’t win a Cannes Lion by designing one. But you can make such an aweful lot of usability mistakes that none of your users will finally be able to use it. Design patterns are there to make your life easier when it comes to standard problems. Login forms, registration forms, movie player interfaces…these types of objects are well known and don’t have to be redesigned every time you meet one of them (think in learned, proven usability here). And to collect all of these UX best practice cases, Yahoo has published its great Yahoo! Design Pattern Library a couple of years ago – a standard in UX resources, created by the two usability experts who have just published the book I want to recommend now.

Designing Social Interfaces
No matter wether we talk about sharing options, online forums, or member interaction in brand communities – digital assets must be social nowadays to stay relevant. It’s no secret that social can mean pretty much everything. But as the title says: ‘Designing Social Interfaces’ wants to explain standard social tools and how we design them in the most effective way:

• 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

DIY – that’s the idea behind the book. We know this hands-on approach from the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library – and in fact it is just the social extension of it. Standard functions like Rating an object or Inviting people to join a community have been part of Yahoo’s collection for quite some time.  And you will find a lot of already existing Social Web Patterns in this book again (as I said, the authors founded Yahoo’s library), nevertheless this handy social interface compendium extends Yahoo’s gallery to more than 100 concepts in interface design ready to use.

‘Designing Social Interfaces’ is not primarily a book about social assets or concepts. It’s a book about usability. Design patterns always revolved around the question how to ease the design and increase the usability to a commonly occurring problem in software design. This book offers an enormous amount of reusable templates for all creatives involved in the design of a social interface. Plus it adds a lot of theory to it…written in a very entertaining and understandable form.

But this book if…
…you’re interested in interface design, UX and usability. You will probably not read this book in bed at night. It will rather rest on your desktop in case you need it. Understand it as a catalogue of options which you are supposed to use when you are confronted with a certain standard challenge in interface design. Web design patterns should never be understood as take away designs but as standards which you are supposed to adapt and to optimize.

I think ‘Designing Social Interfaces’ is remarkable in some ways. First up, it’s a great compendium of a broad variety of cases and a highly interesting read. Secondly, it prooves once more that social has become a standard in digital projects. Social interface design now is one more element of setting up digital experiences. And finally it brings together two concepts which by now were not in the focus of digital practitioners: Social and UX. In case you are in touch with one of these topics, buy this book.

Get the book here*: ‘Designing Social Interfaces’ on amazon

Further links

• Wiki: Check out social patterns and make them better
• Screenshots: Flickr page for ‘Designing Social Interfaces’

* Yes, I am part of amazon’s affiliate network and will receive 0.0001 cents or something if you buy this book via my link. No, this will not turn me into a brainless zombie book industry slave.

Tags: Books, Design Patterns, Interfaces, Social Influence Marketing, UX, visual

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