Designing Social Interfaces: Principles, Patterns, and Practices for Improving the User Experience

Through expert guidance backed by years of experience, readers learn how to create user interfaces that will make their social websites truly effective. 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. This book presents a set of design principles, patterns, and best practices that readers can use to create user interfaces (UI) for new social websites, or as a way to improve upon existing social sites.

Christian Crumlish is the curator of the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library and has been designing and writing about online user experiences since 1994. He is a director of the Information Architecture Institute and co-chair of the monthly BayCHI program. He is the author of The Power of Many and is writing a book called Designing Social Interfaces for O'Reilly Media with Erin Malone. He studied philosophy at Princeton and painting at the San Francisco School of Art, and lives in Oakland, California, with his wife, Briggs, and his cat, Fraidy.

Erin Malone is Principal with Tangible UX, and has over 20 years of experience leading design teams and developing social experiences as well as web and software applications and system-wide solutions. Prior to Tangible, she spent 4 years at Yahoo! leading the Platform User Experience Design team where they were responsible for building the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library and for providing design expertise to the popular YUI (Yahoo! User Interface Library). Additionally, Erin led the redesign of the Yahoo! Developer Network, oversaw the redesign of Yahoo!'s registration system, developed the ux team's intranet and worked on other cross-company initiatives. Before Yahoo!, she was a Design Director at AOL, Creative Director at AltaVista, and chief Information Architect for Zip2. Erin was the founding editor-in-chief of Boxes and Arrows and is the author of several articles on interaction design history, design management, and is a founding member of the IA Institute. She is currently working on the book Designing Social Interfaces with Christian Crumlish for O'Reilly Media.