Designing For The Social Web

No matter what type of web site or application you’re building, social interaction among the people who use it will be key to its success. They will talk about it, invite their friends, complain, sing its high praises, and dissect it in countless ways. With the right design strategy you can use this social interaction to get people signing up, coming back regularly, and bringing others into the fold. With tons of examples from real-world interfaces and a touch of the underlying social psychology theory, Joshua Porter shows you how to design your next great social web application. Inside, you’ll discover: • The real reasons why people participate online and the psychology behind them • The Usage Lifecycle—or how people use your web application over time • How to get people past that trickiest of hurdles: sign-up • What to do when you’ve launched a web application and nobody is using it • How to analyze the effectiveness of your application screens and flows • How to grow your social web application from zero users to 1000—and beyond Designing for the social web is about much more than adding features. It’s about embracing the social interaction of the people who make you successful—and then designing smartly to encourage it.

This book uses data collected from in-depth interviews with young people over the course of a year to explore the complex role of social media in their lives, and the part it plays in shaping how they understand and present their identity to a broad public on a wide array of platforms. Using this data, the book proposes and develops a new theoretical framework for understanding identity performances. Comic Theory, detailed in this book, centres on a consideration of the role of social media design in shaping identity, and explores the ways in which socio-culturally grounded users engage in acts of compromise, novelty, and negotiation with social media designs and digital technologies to produce unique identity performances. Positioned within the field of educational research, this book overtly challenges assumptions and myths about the internet as a neutral source of knowledge, instead exploring the way in which designs and technologies shape who we interact with and how we understand what it is to be social. Moving beyond the over-used ‘digital natives’ paradigm, this book makes a clear case that educators and education researchers need to move beyond a focus on coding and digital skills alone, highlighting the pressing need to take explicit account of the overlaps between digital technology, culture, and education.

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

Building a web application that attracts and retains regular visitors is tricky enough, but creating a social application that encourages visitors to interact with one another requires careful planning. This book provides practical solutions to the tough questions you'll face when building an effective community site -- one that makes visitors feel like they've found a new home on the Web. If your company is ready to take part in the social web, this book will help you get started. Whether you're creating a new site from scratch or reworking an existing site, Building Social Web Applications helps you choose the tools appropriate for your audience so you can build an infrastructure that will promote interaction and help the community coalesce. You'll also learn about business models for various social web applications, with examples of member-driven, customer-service-driven, and contributor-driven sites. Determine who will be drawn to your site, why they'll stay, and who they'll interact with Create visual design that clearly communicates how your site works Build the software you need versus plugging in one-size-fits-all, off-the-shelf apps Manage the identities of your visitors and determine how to support their interaction Monitor demand from the community to guide your choice of new functions Plan the launch of your site and get the message out

Following the introduction of Myspace, Linkedin and Facebook, social networks have become part of people’s everyday life. New online social networks appear almost daily developed to attract the attention of Internet users. However, design and implementation standards and guidelines are often sacrificed for innovation resulting in unusable social networking platforms destined to be doomed. Within this context, the present book recommends a design and implementation methodology which will allow future social networking platform designers and developers to work in a scientifically systematic and sound manner to reach their goal. The journey begins with the identification of the pursued objective of the social network and the potential participants. The presentation of various methods and techniques to collect the requirements of the intended user group of the social networking platform follows. Best practices, guidelines and standards that will facilitate the conceptual and physical design of the platform are portrayed. An analysis of advantages and limitations for existing implementation platforms and potential implementation techniques is subsequently offered to facilitate the selection of the most appropriate tool for the implementation of the online social networking website. Various representative visualization techniques are examined in order to enhance the visual representation of the social network participants. Various usability evaluation techniques are then presented to aid in the assessment of usability and improvement of the actual user experience. Finally, future trends in the design and use of social networks are presented.

Provides information on designing, building, and maintaining a Web site, discussing such topics as web color, file formats, platform selection, content management, analytics, and search engine optimization.

Designing for User Engagement on the Web: 10 Basic Principles is concerned with making user experience engaging. The cascade of social web applications we are now familiar with — blogs, consumer reviews, wikis, and social networking — are all engaging experiences. But engagement is an increasingly common goal in business and productivity environments as well. This book provides a foundation for all those seeking to design engaging user experiences rich in communication and interaction. Combining a handbook on basic principles with case studies, it provides readers with a rich understanding of engagement: extending a welcome, setting the context, making a connection, sharing control, supporting interaction, creating a sense of place, and planning to continue the engagement. Based on research funded by the Society for Technical Communication, the case studies illustrate how designers build community in order to support education, connect kids to community resources, introduce users to other cultures, foster collaboration, encourage activism, and much more. Whatever your motive, if you aim to create engaging user experiences, you will want to explore Designing for User Engagement on the Web.