http://jonhung.com/blog User Experience, design, etc Wed, 11 Aug 2010 04:43:14 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 en hourly 1 http://jonhung.com/blog/2009/10/30/kink-social-design-patterns/ http://jonhung.com/blog/2009/10/30/kink-social-design-patterns/#comments Sat, 31 Oct 2009 02:00:09 +0000 jon http://jonhung.com/blog/?p=757 Here are some shots I took on a tour of kink.com Despite being exciting, touring the Armory wasn't the entire purpose of the night. Erin Malone gave an outstanding presentation about designing social interfaces, an area she’s been working with since contributing to the launch of the Yahoo Pattern library, a valuable resource for UX professionals. Here’s a list of takeaways from the presentation:

• There were several connections between architecture and social design. Both create an ecosystem (one physical, the other virtual) which people act within and on. The designer's role is to "pave the cowpaths" - chart out the area with paths for its intended use.
• Because of the duplicity of names, users require more complex forms of identification besides name. This can be a picture, badges, biographical info, etc.
• talk like a human. Designing a social interface should be different than designing a bank transaction. No robo-speak allowed.
• Related to watching how you speak, designers should consider the difference between "me" and "you". In the world of social media, propriety of information is still a gray area which one should be sensitive to.
• Competition can be good, if you want to foster competition, otherwise people will game the system for no purpose besides being on top.
• Pay attention to the organic use of your social system, e.g. Friendster failure– fake profiles emerged because people wanted to create associations around things other than real people.
• Related to fake profiles, social media should refer to some social object, an “aboutness”. Once a user creates a profile, then what?
• Important questions: What is going to be the behavioral norm? What about your power user? Your system has to accomodate the user who never adjusts anything from the defaults but also the user who wants to explore every last feature.
• Humans are unpredictable.

As it should be when listening to a provocative speaker, the session left me with more questions than answers.]]> Here’s a list of takeaways from the presentation:

• There were several connections between architecture and social design. Both create an ecosystem (one physical, the other virtual) which people act within and on.  The designer’s role is to “pave the cowpaths” – chart out the area with paths for its intended use.
• Because of the duplicity of names, users require more complex forms of identification besides name. This can be a picture, badges, biographical info, etc.
• talk like a human. Designing a social interface should be different than designing a bank transaction. No robo-speak allowed.
• Related to watching how you speak, designers should consider the difference between “me” and “you”.  In the world of social media, propriety of information is still a gray area which one should be sensitive to.
• Competition can be good, if you want to foster competition, otherwise people will game the system for no purpose besides being on top.
• Pay attention to the organic use of your social system, e.g. Friendster failure– fake profiles emerged because people wanted to create associations around things other than real people.
• Related to fake profiles, social media should refer to some social object, an “aboutness”.  Once a user creates a profile, then what?
• Important questions: What is going to be the behavioral norm? What about your power user? Your system has to accomodate the user who never adjusts anything from the defaults but also the user who wants to explore every last feature.
• Humans are unpredictable.

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