Pre-conference workshop

Design and architecture of social web experiences

Christina Wodtke, Joshua Porter, Christian Crumlish

Social websites have unique information architecture needs. The designers and architects must put in place structures and affordances that invite participation and connecting, but the participants themselves determine the ultimate shape of the site. The art of designing such experiences requires a clear model of how people are represented in the system and what they are invited to do there.

This workshop teaches core principals for creating robust and vibrant online communities, and illuminates critical design decisions that help a community thrive. Learn about the building blocks of social software, and which ones are most relevant to your business. Learn how to promote desired behaviors with interface design, and who’s doing it right. Learn when to apply familiar designs (such as with logging in or adding a friend) and when to strike out into entirely new territory.

We’ll answers questions like:

• What are avatars, and why should you show them?
• When do you let your users be anonymous?
• Blogging, wikis and message boards: what’s appropriate for your site?
• Do you need a social network?
• Spam and trolls – how do you keep the neighborhood clean?

We’ll discuss why wikitorial failed, why a social network is not what Washington Post needs, and why Twitter works… for Twitter. From The Well to LinkedIn, we’ll examine where community helps you thrive and when it can bite you on the keister.

Group activities will include

• Brainstorm the elements of a particular community
• Given a community, create an activity analysis of the important social interactions that take place there regularly
• Envision and design social interaction flows
• Given a list of social features, sketch a screen that supports them. Prioritize and place them according to what you think is most important to the health of the community.