5 steps, 5 principles and 5 no-no's for designing social interfaces

Designing for the crowd

So you’ve got the killer social application, community, feature, software. The idea is going to make mint! Now what?

According to IDEA2009 – the conference for social and experience design, held here at MaRS yesterday – you need to design an experience that will make that idea sing with users. For that, Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone, authors of O’Reilly Media’s Designing Social Interfaces, present: 5 Steps, 5 Principles and 5 No-No’s for your killer social media innovation.

Five Steps to Successful Social Interfaces

Does your killer idea incorporate all these steps?

1. Give a way for people to be identified and to identify themselves.
2. Make sure there is a “there”. What’s there? What’s the social object? People want to connect based on interests.
3. Give people something to do. Collecting objects (like links or photos). Tagging.  Start small with these things and grow it to allow sharing or feedback.
4. Enable a bridge to real-life events. A virtual community is enriched by the real world (and vice versa). Let them associate a real voice to the message they’re getting – figure out how to encourage people to get together.
5. Let the community elevate the people and content they value. Like Flickr’s “interestingness”. Then gently moderate.

Five Principles of Successful Social Interfaces

Guidelines that you can apply to interpret any design “best practices”  and make the specific decisions you need to make. Because every project is different.

1. Pave the cow paths. People don’t always go where you expect them to. Find out what they’re doing and then make that easier.
2. Talk like a person. This is a conversation. You are a human being and people like hearing from humans, not robots. Make it personal.
3. Be open. Play well with others.
4. Learn from games. Reputation or point systems make it fun.
5. Respect the ethical dimension. Making your idea or system viral should not mean spam. Because people hate spam. And they’ll hate you if you enable it.

Five Anti-Patters for Successful Social Interfaces

What to avoid — AKA: the don’ts.

1. Cargo Cult. Don’t attempt to imitate without understanding how or why the original worked. (IE: Flickr wasn’t successful because of their name. Hence, Zoomr won’t work just because they dropped a  vowel too.)
2. Don’t Break Email. People use email and they love it. Take advantage of the existings tools, behaviours and habits of users.
3. The Password Hold Up. Don’t make people give up their passwords for other sites in order to connect to the users they know in that community. Don’t force users to give up information – it’s sneaky. There are other ways to allow connections, like Open ID and Facebook Connect.
4. Ex-Boyfriend (or Girlfriend) Bug. This is when a system suggests connections based on friends-of-friends, to people who are not desired, like an ex-boyfriend or ex-girlfriend. Allow users to cluster friends and set permissions based on those clusters instead. That way, their ex doesn’t have to know where they are.
5. Potemkin Village. Creating a “fake village” to impress your users? Don’t. They won’t be able to to figure out how or where to connect. They’ll wander empty rooms. Put them all in one or two groups — they’ll let you know when they need more.

Want more details? Get fantastic insight from their book wiki: Designing Social Interfaces

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Tags: design, ict, IDEA09, social media, web