Designing Social Interfaces, 2nd Edition

Preface

Why We Updated This Book

WE WROTE AND DECIDED TO UPDATE THIS BOOK BECAUSE WE NEEDED A BOOK LIKE THIS, and we knew there wasn’t one on the market yet. Our own pattern collection, documentation, and arrangement of social user experience interface design patterns grew large and complex enough that we felt it warranted a book-length treatment. We wrote this book to build on the work we were doing at Yahoo! several years ago, and the work of the social design community at large. We wanted 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 in the world today is being asked to consider the social dimension of their work, and we wanted to help. We updated the book because in the five years since the first edition, social experience design has evolved—some things that looked like patterns haven’t stood the test of time, and some new potential patterns have emerged. Beyond that, mobile has become a major part of the lexicon and new patterns and ways of interacting have become part of the landscape.

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 ...