Designing Social Websites

Humans are funny animals, and behave in surprising ways. In an information space, a human’s needs are simple and his behavior straightforward. Find. Read. Save. But once you get a bunch of humans together, communicating and collaborating, sometimes you see the madness of crowds and sometimes the wisdom of crowds. For example, an online news service is as likely to select an insightful political commentary or an illegal crack for a piece of software as their top story. This makes the architecture in social spaces the most challenging work a designer can take on. While your designs can never control people, but it certainly can encourage good behavior and discourage bad.

This workshop teaches core principals for creating robust and vibrant online communities, and illuminates critical design decisions that help a community thrive. Learn about the building blocks of social software, and which ones are most relevant to your business. Learn how to promote desired behaviors with interface design, and who’s doing it right. Learn when to apply familiar designs (such as with logging in or adding a friend) and when to strike out into entirely new territory.

I’ll answers questions like:

• When do you let your users be anonymous?
• Blogging, wikis and message boards: what’s appropriate for your site?
• Do you need a social network?
• Spam and trolls – how do you keep the neighborhood clean?

We’ll discuss why wikitorial failed, why social network are hard to launch in the enterprise, and why Twitter works… for Twitter. From The Well to LinkedIn, we’ll examine where community helps you thrive and when it can bite you on the keister.

• Brainstorm the elements of a particular community
• Given a community, design the important social interactions that take place there regularly
• Envision a social interface