Book Review - Designing Social Interfaces

I have chosen a new book (2009) from the field of interface design and in more detail about designing social interfaces - “Designing Social Interfaces – Principles, Patterns and Practices for Improving the User Experience” by Cristian Crumlish and Erin Malone.

The book provides the reader with a collection of features and functions used in social interfaces. The functions are grouped together according to their type – profile related, organising and presenting created content, contributing etc. All functions are described in turns of why, how and where to be used.

Patterns are defined as “Common, successful interaction design components and design solutions for a known problem in a context.” The aim of patterns is developing a common language for designers and developers to produce user interfaces that provide the user with high quality user experience.

The patterns have detailed descriptions on when and how to use each of them, why is it used and examples are presented from known popular networks. For each pattern, other related patterns are named, so it is very useful for finding the best solution among similar ones.

The book is organised growing from explaining what are social patterns to going mobile with it. The authors start with historical overview of network development and analysing the activities around them – forums, blogging, tagging, linking, etc. The second section describes everything that has to do with defining the users personal identity and visibility – signing up, profile, friends and network, testimonial etc.

Third section goes with user's desired objects and activities for that – collecting data/objects and organizing them via tagging or news feed, bookmarking, blogging, feedback opportunities, communication and collaboration between users, following and filtering interesting objects and users. Fourth part is about the relationships between the users and managing groups. Fifth section is about making business with social interfaces, application programming interfaces and going mobile.

In my opinion, the book could be beneficial for people studying social interface design, starting or already developing a social network or an extension to one. Authors describe the social objects (some media objects or things like calendar events) and the activities people can do with these objects or with one another, through social interfaces. I see it more as an encyclopaedia type of book used to find information about certain feature than a linear book.

In comparison to "Don't Make Me Think!" and "About Face 3", this book is more detailed about one certain field - the features and patterns. Therefore it seems to be a great addition or extension after reading the others.