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

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 5 Ratings

Groundbreaking and essential - 2009-12-01
Reviewer Rating:
Malone and Crumlish have done the user-experience design community an amazing service with this volume. It does the hard, rigorous work that most of us simply do not have time or dedication to do -- creating the first solid set of building blocks for designing socially driven digital platforms.
The book goes beyond the easy categories of things like "blogs & wikis" and breaks those and other compounds down into their essential elements, helping us make more informed and less platform-dependent decisions.
Design patterns are always challenging to produce, especially since designers inevitably nit-pick them to death. But these patterns are up to the challenge: they actually make sense, and I suspect will stand up handsomely to the persnickety-designer test. But even if you differ with some of their particulars, it's incredibly valuable to have the heavy lifting already done, so all you have to do is react, refine and "improve" for your own use.
More than a mere collection of patterns, the book doles out large helpings of hard-won wisdom from the authors and other veterans of the industry who have wrestled with the volatile, emergent nature of socially driven digital design.
If you're doing anything with social design, from being asked to create a corporate blog to enhancing the way employees share knowledge on your intranet, do yourself a favor and get familiar with Designing Social Interfaces.

Exhaustive, excellent - 2009-12-02
Reviewer Rating:
This book is a fairly exhaustive catalog of most UI patterns in place today with sites that integrate social networking. There are some very interesting discussions about each pattern, when to use it and who uses it.

This book really shines when it breaks out to discuss the CONS of a pattern. Although this isn't done for all patterns - and I wish it was - it remains very insightful ways to learn more about a pattern.

If you are an alpha user of social networking, then you'll recognize most of these patterns and this book will help you catalog them and reference them when necessary. If you are not an alpha user, then the book serves as an education first.

Really well written - easy to read.

An Excellent Pattern-based Approach To Designing Social Web Applications - 2009-11-02
Reviewer Rating:
This excellent handbook of Patterns for Designing Interfaces for The Social Web and Mobile Applications contains extremely valuable examples of superior Interface Components and Approaches to designing for the Social Web. If you are already in the process of designing a Social Web Application or Mobile Interface to that Application this book definitely will guide your selection of content for that Software Tool or Widget. As a beginner in the design of Interfaces involving Social or Collaborative Content I could have benefited from a more step-by-step guide to determining the goals and constraints of a Social Application prior to choosing the Patterns which will enable an excellent user interface. This guidebook to Social Web and Mobile Interface Patterns will become the Standard Excellent Reference Work for Web Design Studios executing Social Applications. If on the other hand you require (like myself) a functional guide to the steps in defining and constructing a site and a taxonomy of possible goals and constraints for your design project, this reference work may be a bit more advanced than would suit those familiarization goals.

--Ira Laefsky

Superb insights into social networking - 2010-02-06
Reviewer Rating:
I am currently developing an intranet site for a large utility. These days everyone wants 'social networking" to be a part of what they do, but that doesn't ever seem to translate into anything more than a Twitter feed or link to a Facebook page. This book clearly details what is required to build a site with social networking characteristics. It itemises the building blocks, the content required and patterns that are required, to make your site hum along. My only criticism would be the excessive Yahoo references throughout - a little like listening to a one-eyed fan giving the broadcast commentary on their own team - but given this book is by Yahoo this is to be expected.

Encyclopedic reference of social design patterns - 2010-01-12
Reviewer Rating:
This is a great reference for social design patterns. It covers patterns from all sorts of "social" sites from commenting systems, to virtual prizes/badges, to whether you should describe pages to users as "my dashboard" vs "your dashboard". Crumlish and Malone have obviously had direct experience with all these patterns and give great descriptions of the when's, how's and why's/why not's. A very worthwhile reference.

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Human-Computer Interaction
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Human-Computer Interaction > Online Communities
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