Designing Social Interfaces

Preface

Why We Wrote This Book

We wrote this book because we needed a book like this and we knew there wasn’t one on the market yet. Our own pattern collection and documentation and arrangement of “social user experience interface” design patterns grew large and complex enough that we felt it warranted a book-length treatment and presentation. We wrote this book to build on the work we were doing at Yahoo! and the work of the social design community at large. We wrote this to propose a large macro-landscape for organizing and discussing these interaction patterns and to help build a consensus on a common language and set of conventions for discussing social design. We wrote this book because every web designer and developer on the planet today is being asked to consider the social dimension of their work, and we wanted to help.

What This Book Is About

This book is not about designing social behaviors, although many of the interactions are either dependent on or drive specific social behaviors. Many of the principles in the first section of this book talk about different kinds of user behavior, but are best considered across the landscape of the entire pattern collection.

This book is about interaction design, specifically designing social interactions and interfaces on the Web and in mobile environments (although we primarily focus on the Web).

The collection of patterns is a distillation of many years of experience in designing social and community products for the Web that have led ...