SxDSalon: A group blog on social interaction design

Summit interview with Kent State’s Tom Froehlich

When I was in Phoenix for the IA Summit this year, I had the privilege of sitting down with Tom Froehlich of Kent State University’s information department (with Valerie Kelly behind the camera) for a chat about IA, design patterns, social design, and more: They also spoke with Donna Spencer, Andrea Resmini, Andrew Hinton, Luke Wroblewski, Kevin Cheng, and Eric Reiss, and I look forward to watching their videos too.

The real life social network – questions about boundaries

There is no such thing as “friends”. That’s the most powerful conclusion in an excellent presentation about in-depth research by Paul Adams, UX researcher at Google. Most people tend to have 4-6 groups of friends, each of which has 2-10 people, and there is typically very little overlap between them. These friends represent different life stages and interests. A person’s large “friend list” on a service such as Facebook or Twitter actually consists of a han...

Information vs. conversation?

This Edge blog post suggests that Facebook’s problem isn’t that it violated people’s expectation about privacy, but that it’s trying to change the social dynamic on the site from conversation between friends and family to sharing information. I think this distinction is misleading regarding people’s communication, Facebook’s strategy, and Twitter’s strategy too. The article argues that Facebook was initially set up as a way to talk with friends and f...

5 Enterprise 2.0 Myth Mantras that Must Die

This week's Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston was quite good. It is one of the few conference I still won't miss. The conference is a good mix of vendors, implementers, and those who live with those results while working hard to improve upon this. This conference is a great place to talk with people who working through the gaps in Enterprise 2.0 tools and services, but still finding great improvements in their company from these tools and services. Enterprise 2.0 tools and services com...

User experience of the iPhone vs. iPad

My company, Bolt | Peters, recently conducted a user experience study of interactions on the iPhone vs. the iPad using a mobile payment system called Square. The most important take-away of this study to me is how social all our technologies are becoming — and how important social is as a design consideration. (We saw this with the iPad.) I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again… But for now, you can read the article in UX Magazine. Or the brief write-up by ZDNet. Or watch the...

Realizing Robert Scoble’s vision of the end of social information silos

Last week, Robert Scoble wrote Location 2012, an excellent blog post where he illustrated a vision of a world where location-based services could work together instead of being information silos. Services including FourSquare, PlanCast, Tungle, Glympse, and Siri work together to notify Scoble’s friends where he is and where he is going, so they can meet each other instead of missing each other. Services such as Blippy and Expensify share Scoble’s financial data on his behalf. To...

Conversation curation

In a couple of good posts, JP Rangaswami reflects on the need and opportunity for democratized curation. He cites Google CEO Eric Schmidt quantifying the incredible amount of information being generated on the internet – these days, 5 exabytes of information is created every two days, as much as all the information created between the dawn of civilisation and 2003. JP writes about the need for curation of text, music, image, and video. I’d like to focus on a new opportunity – ...

The game is the frame: what realworld software can learn from games

Sebastian Deterding has put together an attractive and substantive presentation for UXCamp Europe, exploring the principles of game design and how these principles may or may not be applicable to software design. Historically, user experience has focused on tasks and efficiency, not fun. To cut to the chase, Deterding concludes that software user experience is fundamentally different from games, for two reasons. Most importantly, what makes games fun is that they are voluntary and have no rea...

Designing for Play slides from WebVisions 2010

Wow, WebVisions was amazing, as was Portland, and the hospitality of my friends there and the organizers of the conference. Thanks to everyone who made it possible! (I mean, Ukepalooza – say no more.) Here are the slides from my talk, Designing for Play:

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...