Designing Social Interfaces

Knowing how to create a social website to foster user interaction and community building is becoming a core skill for developers and designers today, but grasping the nuances of the social web is much harder than it appears. With more than 100 patterns, principles, and best practices, this book presents practical design solutions that you can use immediately to create or improve a social website interface. Written by curators of "Yahoo!'s Pattern Library", "Designing Social Interfaces" shares hard-won insights into what works, what doesn't, and why. That includes salient advice for many of the common challenges designers and developers face when building managing social websites. This book will help you: learn basic design patterns for adding a social element to an existing site; reign 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; and, offer your members the opportunity to connect with each other in the real world. The book also exposes antipatterns: emergent bad practices in the social network and social media space.