Social Experience Design

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?

• We are a team being asked to add “social” or “gamification” to our site!
• We have an active community on our site but people are misbehaving. How can we 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.
• We have a great idea for a social utility but we don’t want to have to first re-create the social infrastructure of the web inside of it.
• People come and read our content, but they’re invisible to each other. How can we 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 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 andrelate 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

1/2 Day includes:

• Presentations and stories for context
• Group discussions
• Group brainstorms and sketching