Social software design (anti-)patterns

acb — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 01:32:20 -0800

Yahoo!'s Christian Crumlish puts forward five principles of good social software design, and five anti-patterns, or ways to get it wrong. The anti-patterns will undoubtedly be familiar to most people from sites they have used:

Briefly, the Cargo Cult means imitating superficial features of successful websites and applications without really understanding what makes them work. Don't Break Email warns against the practice of using email as a one-way notification or broadcast medium while disabling your users' ability to hit reply as a normal response. The Password Anti-Pattern is the pernicious practice of asking users to give you their passwords on other systems so that you can import their data for them, thus training them to be loose and insecure with their private information. The Ex-Boyfriend Bug crops up when you try to leverage a user's social graph without realizing that some of the gaps in a person's network may be deliberate and not an up-sell opportunity. Lastly, a Potemkin Village is an overly elaborated set of empty community discussion areas or other collaborative spaces, created in anticipation of a thriving population rather than grown organically in response to their needs (see also Pave the Cowpaths).

recycled web visuals and other web tools

nickyskye — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 17:25:58 -0800

Design Patterns, Reuse, recycle, but don’t reinvent the wheel unless necessary. This collection captures findings of consistent, unique or interesting interfaces and design flows from across the web. One of the many tools, tutorials etc. from Smashing Magazine's list, Best of September 2007. "Design Patterns by Brian Christiansen at UI Engineering. Via."

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Social software design (anti-)patterns

recycled web visuals and other web tools