Best of Delicious. My favorite Design Pattern Gallery Links.

Oktober 5th, 2011 • Links
Tags: Delicious Stacks, Design, Design Patterns, Links

Did I ever say how much I love delicious and how happy I am that it was saved from Yahoo? The latest moves by the new owners Hurley and Chen point into the right direction: An overhaul for one of the oldest social bookmarking platforms is more than necessary. And the new Stacks feature (=a social bookmarking playlist) is great. It just needs an embedding and commenting function.

So after saving a million links on delicious I would like to share some of my favorite marketing/tech/digital-related ones here. Today I would like to share my Design-Pattern-Stack with whoever is interested in it. I guess most of you know what Design Pattern are: Standard design solutions for standard interaction problems. So feel free to check out my most favorite links to Design Pattern solutions saved as a Stack. And I am happy if you comment which links I have missed.

Good books. Designing Social Interfaces.

November 22nd, 2009 • 7 comments Books
Tags: Books, Design Patterns, Interfaces, Social Influence Marketing, UX, visual

‘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

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