IxDA Conference on Designing Social Interfaces

I am a member of the LA chapter of IxDA which is a network of folks involved with Interaction Design; check out their Ning page here.

We met at the MySpace HQ in Hollywood, which I thought was kind of random.  I mean of all places to pick your HQ for a social media mogul you pick the land of glitz and glamour instead of where all the nerds roam like Palo Alto, San Jose, or even Austin, Texas.  Weird.

Anyway, the event was headlined by Erin Malone, the current head honcho of their User Interaction Design at MySpace, who also has a new book out entitled Designing Social Interfaces - 5 principles, 5 practices, 5 anti-patterns.

One of my biggest takeaways from the conference was that wow, the new design of all applications will be social.  It's official the twilight of one-way banter and the dawn of complete social interaction.  The companies that get this phenomena will succeed, those that dont will die.

The 5 main principles she discusses in her book are the following:

Pave the cowpaths.

Kinda like the Pareto efficiency concept, build around 80% then let the users define the remaining 20%.  Once you observe their usage patterns, build the rest out and keep moving.  Simple but profound concept that few companies adopt

Talk like a person.

For error messages, application updates, and all things from the company out to client - let their be common language spoken in a fun, down-to-earth, non-jargony method.

Be Open. Play well with others.

The easier a social site makes it for you to share photos across your sites, share contacts, update statuses, and even utilize common login credentials will make using multiple sites that much more likely from a consumer perspective.

Learn from games.

Games hit the social networks first and have learned some valuable lessons from their extremely large, diverse user base.  There is a lot to learn about what people like about reputations points, profiling, communication, etc.

Respect the ethical dimension.

If users sign up to use your service, dont bombard with emails, periodical subscription opportunities, and sell their address information to direct marketers.  Its a fickle market out there, so respect people that decide to use your service.

There were also some other very interesting concepts that Erin discussed like the Power Law of Participation and the Participation Ladder.  For example, depending on our interest, we may be a passive reader, a follower, a commentator, or maybe all the way up to a full on to a collaborating list/group member.  
I think it kind of puts into perspective what to expect from people.  First comes the social object, then come the interested people according to their participation ladder or interest in the object. 


Cool stuff.