SxDSalon: A group blog on social interaction design

Go With the Flow

Go With the Flow :: Web Visions 2010, May20 View more presentations from erin malone. I gave a new talk today at Web Visions 2010. Called Go With the Flow, this talk covers ideas, techniques and optimization recommendations for customer acquisition, onboarding, engagement and virality in growing social sites. The second half of the talk covers ideas for bridging the gap to real life – using social tools to create real life gatherings and then collecting the artifacts of these real life ac...

Evolution of a diagram – the IA Summit poster

At the recent IA Summit 2010, we showed a poster rather than giving a talk. The poster, describes visually, the evolution of our social taxonomy and the influences from others on that and the eventual diagram we have been showing. For folks who weren’t there, here is the diagram in all its glory. If you want to download it (2.3mb pdf) feel free – just credit us if you decide to use it, and credit the other authors if you decide to use any of the other elements. From left to right, ...

Identity, Privacy and Differences for Women Online

Lately I have been thinking a lot about identity online and how things like age and gender affect how you approach projecting an online identity. Working with a startup that is creating opportunities for kids to be digital citizens with ownershop and accountability for their online identities made me wonder about what should be encouraged and what tools we need to be creating, implementing, educating people about when it comes to managing who they are and how they will be seen online. Can teachi...

neighborhoods and subcultures in social design

In writing our book, Designing Social Interfaces, we challenged ourselves to creating a social pattern language, much like Christopher Alexander created a pattern language for building and architecture. We have followed the evolution of design patterns but looking back into A Pattern Language, there are some concepts that Alexander talks about that are directly applicable for consideration when designing social spaces. Architecture is about creating spaces for people. The type of space and how i...

The Questions We Ask

A couple of weeks ago I gave the 5 Principles, 5 Practices, 5 Anti-Patterns talk to the IxDA Los Angeles group. It was a great group of people and they asked me some really tough questions at the end of the talk. I thought some of them were so good, I have been thinking about them since and wanted to share more thoughts about the ideas. 1. We are now seeing lots of people online and using sites like Facebook. People are living out their experiences online and sharing all sorts of things  –...

Unintended Side Effects

I have been presenting the material from our book over the last several months and have been asked questions about some of the anti-patterns and how we avoid or solve them. Most recently at Web 2.0, I was talking with a bunch of smart, interesting people and a few things have bubbled up that I think are worth poking at that we need to pay attention to as “social” becomes more ubiquitous. Issue 1: Authentication Service Hell The first is the UI and conceptual quagmire we have inadve...

Web 2.0 NY – Designing Social Interfaces Workshop

I attended Web 2.0 NY Expo this past week as a workshop presenter. I took the talk that Christian and I did at IDEA 09 and that I did at IxDA SF and fleshed it out into a 3 hour, hands on workshop. I believe it went well. Here are my slides: Designing Social Interfaces – Web 2.0 NY Workshop Version View more presentations from erin malone. One the new things I did, was take leftover cards from the Social Mania game and use them as flash cards (our original idea). I gave each partici...

Diagramming the Social Ecosystem

One of the things we have been doing since way before we started the book, was to visualize the social ecosystem and the inter-relationships between categories, patterns and principles. Back in 2007, when I was still at Yahoo! and Bryce Glass was on my team, we developed a diagram for our general manager to talk about the social platforms we were developing and how they worked together. Christian and I took that diagram and modified it a bit for our Core Conversation at SXSW 09 [pdf] and ha...

Unveiling Social Mania: The Game at Idea 09

What a rush! As part of our (mine and Christian Crumlish) presentation at Idea 09, we were presenting from our book: Designing Social Interfaces – 5 Steps, 5 principles and 5 anti-patterns. The talk went well but the big deal was unveiling and playing the game. While we were writing the book, we had discussed doing a set of Pattern cards. Like flash cards. Or the IDEO cards. Pretty cool idea and the patterns are perfect for cards. So I started to develop them and create the production file...

Slides from our talk

Our talk at Idea09 touched on a few key steps for building social experiences, a few of the most salient principles and a handful of the anti-patterns covered in the book. A 40 minute talk barely taps into the breadth of content from the book, but it’s a nice teaser. Designing Social Interfaces: 5 steps, 5 [...]