I asked (on the Twitters, of course) what was the first application to use the pull-to-refresh gesture. My world of followers suggested it was the original Tweetie app, which was then acquired by the Twitter overlords. Since Tweetie, it’s shown up in a bunch of apps on my iPhone. I’m told it’s also on apps all over those Android phones that everyone talks about.

What’s interesting about the pull-to-refresh gesture is how natural it feels. Need more stuff, pull down on the list. Very simple. Very intuitive.

Well, it’s only intuitive if you know about it. You see, the problem is the gesture has no affordance (a hint or clue that the function exists). There’s no way to know where pull-to-refresh is implemented. Anyone who has learned the gesture has probably experienced the pull-to-do-nothing function in all the apps where it’s not implemented. Suddenly, something that’s novel has become a basic expectation, just like Kano taught us it would.

If you didn’t know about pull-to-refresh, how would you learn it’s in your app? For the most point, it requires you learn it from someone else.

Someone who leans over and says, “Hey, did you know you can update your list by just pulling down on your thumb?”

“No Way!” is the usual response, followed by the now-common thumb maneuver. “Cool!” is what comes next.

And it happens. Just like that. We’ve just transmitted the functionality, socially.

Pull-to-refresh isn’t the only socially-transmitted functionality. In years past, it’s how I’ve seen people learn about drag-and-drop in applications. It’s how they learn about special keys, like F5 for refresh or F1 for help. A lot of functionality has been transmitted from one person to the next, socially.

There’s nothing wrong with socially-transmitted functionality, as long as it’s not something the user needs (they can use the design just fine without it) and you have users that talk with each other. The problem comes from when you, as a designer, know about an functionality that only transmits socially, it’s hard to realize that people around you haven’t caught on yet. Just because it’s in your pattern library doesn’t mean your users will know about it.

[A note about accessibility: socially-transmitted functionality is rarely accessible in itself, as it usually has no way for a screen reader to work. For accessibility reasons, you probably want alternative access.]

In a recent site visit, I watched users struggle with navigating around a web app because the return-to-main-menu function was a not-obvious icon that looked like decoration to the untrained eye. All the developers observing the visit knew about it, but this collection of users hadn’t been infected with the knowledge of the functionality, and therefore didn’t use it. Their alternative: sign out of the app and back in again, which returned them to the top-level menu. (Boy, did that ever elicit a sigh of wonderment from the observation party!)

Do you have socially-transmitted functionality in your design? Are they things that users can live without and will be delighted when they hear about it from a friend?

Analyzing data is a great way to make design decisions. But when your analytics log contains billions of clicks, how do you distinguish which ones you should use in forming those decisions? Users’ behavior and activity can provide you with great information and insights. But when do you look to that and when do you trust your own instincts?

Julie Zhuo is the Product Design Manager at Facebook. In her talk at this year’s Web App Masters Tour, Facebook: Data-Informed vs. Data-Driven Design Decisions, Julie discusses Facebook’s design process. The Facebook team uses data to learn about users’ pain points and to support their own intuitions.

Facebook’s deactivation page shows you pictures of your friends to encourage you to reconsider.

Julie and her team know there are downsides to being too data-driven. Numbers and metrics can always look good on paper, but they don’t necessarily speak to your users’ emotions about your brand and image. If you’ve implemented a change that, from an analytics standpoint, works and is successful but leaves a bad taste in the mouths of your users, is it really as successful as initially thought?

Facebook faces some unique design challenges. With 600 million users all over the world, it’s impossible to predict how each individual is going interact with Facebook. Implementing a design or functionality change may thrill many users, but it is equally possible that it will disappoint others. They have to balance user interests against network interests, and certain rules need to be in place to encourage the right types of interactions between people.

Ultimately, data and metrics are great for making design decisions, but they’re only part of the process. Especially for a social network like Facebook, there are many other factors that need strong consideration. How you interpret and use that data is especially important. Having a sense of what your team values from certain endeavors will go a long way to helping inform your decisions.

Come see Julie discuss more of how Facebook confronts these challenges at the Web App Masters Tour. She is one of 11 amazing Masters sharing their insights. The Tour is coming to Seattle in May and Minneapolis in June. For more information visit UIETour.com.

UIE Web App Masters Tour:
Get $100 off the Minneapolis Masters Tour with the promotion code BLOG.
Last Stop! Minneapolis

Recorded: March, 2011
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Communities thrive when there is a common ground and a shared understanding. Connecting and feeling like you belong are essential parts of a community. PatientsLikeMe has created an online community for people struggling with life changing medical conditions. Here they can find support and share their experiences.

Kate Brigham is the Patient Experience Manager at PatientsLikeMe. Rather than focusing solely on forums and discussion, she has helped create an environment that encourages sharing amongst the patients. Through their similar experiences and shared vocabulary, patients create a support structure. In this podcast, Kate talks to Jared Spool about how PatientsLikeMe uses data visualizations to enhance the level of understanding within the community.

Here’s an excerpt from the podcast.

“…People don’t use their real name when they join the site. They have a user name. We allow people to post photographs on their profile, much like on Facebook or Twitter and some people choose to use photographs of themselves. Others choose animals or flowers or other things.

We try to get demographic information about people: are they male or female, how old are they, sort of where are they geographically but without having to identify themselves by name. Through the interface and kind of questions we ask, and through our messaging, you share as much as you are comfortable sharing.

People can also select different levels of privacy. One is where they basically only have their profile visible to people within the community. So there is a sense of a walled garden, and I think that is actually very important too. Many people feel more comfortable talking about this kind of information when they realize they are surrounded by others who are in the same situation.

They are talking to a room full of people who relate, who understand. Even the way that we identify people on their profiles, we very clearly show if someone’s a patient versus a caregiver versus a guest. If somebody is a guest, they are in fact actually required to share their real name.

[The different levels of identification] are ways that we can signal that you can come and share without fear of being publicly outed…”

Tune into the podcast to hear Kate address these additional points:

• How do you approach this very personal information without turning off your user base?
• How do you handle designing an interface that is not only usable but also emotionally supportive?
• How are you using both structured data from surveys and unstructured data from forum discussions to create visualizations?
• How have you converted people’s individual stories into data?

The grocer is definitely manipulating me, getting me to try, and subsequently buy, products I hadn’t otherwise intended to get. Yet I’m quite happy being the target of their manipulative practices. Plus it keeps me coming back to the market.

The food demo isn’t the only manipulative practice my grocery store uses. In fact, the store is a fully-stocked laboratory in persuasive psychology. All of those same techniques are things we can use online, and like the food demo, have our users love us for it.

This week’s UIEtips, Stephen Anderson concludes his two-part article on just one of the techniques we can use online: scarcity. The first part of the article had awesome examples of scarcity in action. (Didn’t see it? You’ll find part 1 here). In the second part, Stephen explains how scarcity works. I’m sure you’ll find it as fascinating as I did.

Read part 2 of Playing Hard to Get – Using Scarcity to Influence Behavior.

You can learn about many of the other techniques in Stephen’s upcoming UIE Virtual Seminar, Leveraging Seductive Interaction Design. During this Thursday’s 90-minute seminar, he’ll walk your team through some great examples of how you can open up your design’s value and functionality to your users. Don’t miss it.
Get the details on Stephen’s webinar.

What techniques for persuasion do you love about the sites you visit? What have you tried in your own designs? Share your thoughts below.

The thinking is that once the heavy snows cut off the roads, fresh shipments of dairy and bakery products won’t get through. This thinking sends everybody rushing to the market to buy the remaining inventories, with some of the more nefarious market owners raising prices in response. All it takes is the whisper of a storm to create instant scarcity of these critical items.

While we don’t have an online equivalent of a French Toast Alert System, designers can use scarcity to encourage their users to take advantage of offers and functionality. In today’s UIEtips, we discuss what happens when we promote scarcity in our designs in the first of a two-part article written by Stephen P. Anderson. Stephen has been studying sites that use scarcity to their advantage, in turn making the sites more fun to use and more compelling to interact with. I’m sure you’ll find his examples as fascinating as I do.

Read the article: Playing Hard to Get – Using Scarcity to Influence Behavior – Part 1

Scarcity is just one technique we can use to take advantage of people’s desire for playfulness and their natural curiosity. Stephen is exploring several of these techniques in his upcoming online UIE Virtual Seminar, Leveraging Seductive Interaction Design on Thursday, November 4. We always find Stephen’s ideas to be
inspirational and thought provoking, giving us new ways to put fun into our designs. You won’t want to miss Stephen’s seminar.

Have you encountered designs that use scarcity? How about different ways to encourage users to act and participate? We’d love to see your examples. Share them below.

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It’s becoming common to see behavioral cues in everyday web applications. Designers are looking to encourage certain actions, and are turning to the principles of behavioral psychology to achieve their goals. No longer solely the domain of social and gaming apps, you can leverage many of these in your daily work.

Stephen Anderson is the first person we think of when it comes to these kinds of interactions. Stephen is an independent consultant and creator of the Mental Notes, a set of reference cards with design insights from the world of psychology.

Stephen is one of the most popular speakers at the Web App Masters Tour and we want to share a sample of his talk, Designing Seductive Business Apps. In this portion of his talk, he presents three concepts: Scarcity, Set Completion and the Feedback Loop.

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Scarcity

Scarcity is a concept we’re all familiar with. When something desirable is rare—like gold—the more valuable it is. When someone is considering the purchase of something, its availability is an important factor in the decision.

Set Completion

Set Completion is something we see all around us. When was the last time you saw a fast food ad where the restaurant was offering a give away? Collectible glasses and kids meal toys are two common ones. Usually there are several different version of the giveaway, and you’re encouraged to “Collect all five!” The closer we are to having a full set, the stronger the urge to complete the set.

The Feedback Loop

The Feedback Loop is essentially “cause and effect.” When we see our actions have an immediate effect on a situation, we are likely to become engaged. Have you ever walked in front of a TV display at a retail store and noticed you were on the TV? It probably stopped you in your tracks. In web apps, the more immediate the effects of our actions are seen, the more engaging the interaction can be.

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It seems we’ve failed to offend our international audience sufficiently, so this week we’ll try again by chatting with Jay Vidyarthi, a designer hailing form Montréal, Québec, Canada. Jay is working on a project with social design aspects. He’s helping design a site where the goal is to build “an involved and contributing community of users.” He wants to know if there are any user experience techniques to encourage participation.

Jared and Robert think human psychology is the place to start. They discuss a couple of recent issues in the social web realm, like the launch of Google Buzz. They suggest a few books which examine the intersection of psych and web design, including Joshua Porter’s Designing for the Social Web, and Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone’s Designing Social Interfaces.

Tune in to see if Robert and Jared manage to help Jay with an answer without offending our friendly neighbors to the north.

Have a serious UX question? Send it in and Jared Spool and Robert Hoekman, Jr. will answer it with a healthy dose of levity. Please send your deep, vexing questions to us at userability@uie.com. We’d love to feature you on the show!

Computers, it seems, are here to stay for a while. However, they’re getting smaller, ubiquitous, and are far more connected. We’re already seeing it, as kids move away from email to more social applications on the tiny screens of their phones.

Social components will likely be everywhere. We’ll look to exploit this connectivity. Making sure our designs have those social interfaces doesn’t come without consideration and planning.

In today’s UIEtips, I discuss how to use a great resource—the new book, Designing Social Interfaces, written by Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone—to ensure we’ve thought through the social components the right way. We’ve been blessed with the work that Erin and Christian put into this masterpiece. It’s an important resource for every design team.

Read the article: Baking Social Interfaces Into Your Design.

I’ve had the great opportunity to talk with Christian and Erin about designing social interfaces, as we’ve been preparing for their presentations at our UIE Web App Masters Tour. They are truly experts in this area, providing teams with great insights into how to leverage the future of integrating social components. You can hear their thinking in Philadelphia and Seattle. Check out the details at www.UIEtour.com.

Have you been employing social components in your design? Where did you find your inspiration? Share your thoughts below.

See Erin Malone present in Philadelphia in June and Christian Crumlish in Seattle in July. Learn more about the Tour at www.UIETour.com

Ken Kellogg’s podcast talks about navigating the design process within a large corporate world, and how customer research plays an integral part of new designs. Listen to Ken’s podcast.

In Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone’s podcast, they talk about the huge collection of social design elements in their book. Christian and Erin also cover social communities and where the growth of “social in” is occurring. Listen to Christian and Erin’s podcast.

Did you miss parts 1-3 of the interview series? We showcased these Masters:

• Part 1 – Julie Zhuo on how Facebook handles design changes. And Bill Scott taking a look at design patterns and rich interactions. Here’s the post to part 1.
• Part 2 – Hagan Rivers’ new approach to designing web app navigation. And Stephen Anderson on how to encourage user behavior with the design of your web app. Read the post to part 2.
• Part 3 – Jason Fried discusses 37signals’ design and development process. And Luke Wroblewski on how to make web forms less intimidating. Here’s the post to part 3.

If you enjoyed the Web App Masters interview series, then you’ll want to explore the Web App Masters Tour. It’s two days of inspiring presentations with a perfect blend of theory and practice. The Tour stops in Minneapolis, Philadelphia, and Seattle. Learn more about the dates and program at www.UIETour.com.

Until April 23, you can register for any of the Tour cities for $795 when you use the promotion code TOURBLOG. Learn more about the tour at www.UIETour.com

Bill Scott’s podcast looked at design patterns and rich interactions. Solid and insightful information that is definitely worth a listen.

In part 2, two more Masters from the Web App Masters Tour, Stephen Anderson and Hagan Rivers, share their wealth of information with us.

Stephen Anderson’s podcast on Seductive Interactions looks at how to encourage user behavior through the design of your web app. Stephen’s cutting edge thinking brings new and exciting ideas to try for your designs. Listen to Stephen’s podcast.

When it comes to web app navigation, Hagan Rivers is the grand master of them all. Her podcast, Escaping Navigation Hell, presents a new approach to designing web app navigation—design it as a separate application. Listen to Hagan’s podcast.

Stephen and Hagan join Julie and Scott along with 9 other Masters for the 4 city Web App Masters Tour. Two days full of inspiration, aimed directly at the designers of today’s web-based applications. Come listen to these Web App Masters share their wisdom and deliver powerful insights you can act on immediately. Learn more about the Tour at www.UIETour.com.

Until April 19, you can register for any of the Tour cities for $795 when you use the promotion code TOURBLOG. Learn more about the tour at www.UIETour.com

As we planned the topics for the Web App Masters Tour, social design principles and patterns was a must have topic. After reading Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone’s book, Designing Social Interfaces, it was a logical pick for these two Masters to present on social design.

At the Tour in San Diego, Luke Wroblewski did an awesome job capturing the essences of Christian’s session. Below are his notes from a blog post on Lukew.com. By the way, Luke also did write-ups on presentations from Hagan Rivers, Stephen Anderson, and Bill Scott

Here is Luke’s reprint.

At the Web App Masters Tour in San Diego, CA, Christian Crumlish provided an overview of social design principles and patterns in his talk Designing The Social In.

• When telephones were new, people didn’t really understand why they needed one. Phones also didn’t make sense until everybody had one. It’s often the same way with new technologies –including social networking.
• Social design is more like architecting a house than designing a billboard. You set the rooms and spaces –but people will decorate and use them how they want.
  People will create the experiences they desire and in social design, people are a big part of what the experience will be.
• User is singular, social interfaces are plural. Solitary activities like reading headlines are relatively easy to measure. Social activities require engagement with others that are most easily measured through social objects.
• Pave the cowpaths: support people’s existing behaviors with the way you design software. Example: dogster started as a photo-sharing service, but moved to a social network for pets when they saw people were uploading many images of their dogs and cats.
• Talk like a person: use conversational voice to let others know there are actual people on the other side. Self-deprecating error messages can make things more acceptable. Posing questions prompts responses, which results in a dialog.
• Your vs. My: use “you” and “yours” to indicate other people are around. This sets the right expectations.
• No joking around: some people will take jokes the wrong way or get confused. No joke will be 100% understood.
• Play well with others: be open to participation. Build on open standards, share data outside your application, accept external data within your application, and support two-way interoperability.
• Learn from games: engagement that comes form how games work helps drive business needs. Games, like social networks, are only designed to a point. They have rules, boundaries, and structures but do not dictate a singular experience.
• Respect the ethical dimension: there is an ethical element when people are involved –private data, who they know, etc. In any ethical decision, the business, the individual, and the collective/community have a stake.
• Social design patterns can be grouped by patterns related to the self, activities, community, and social spaces.
• Give people a way to be identified: let people take ownership and customize their identity. Identity doesn’t always have to manifest itself in a complicated profile.
• Indicate presence so people are aware of who else is within a system. Reputation systems help people learn how to interact with people.
• Attribution and avatars –place people’s identity in context to what they’ve done.
  What is the social object in the site you are building? The social object is the reason two people are talking to each other as opposed to talking to someone else. Social networks form around social objects, not the other way around. In Facebook there are many social objects: videos, gifts, groups, etc.
• Social activities give people things to do. Some people will engage in a few small things, and others may engage in many or larger scale things. Social activities include: collecting, broadcasting/publishing, sharing, giving feedback, communicating, and collaborating.
• Feedback allows people to have conversations about objects
• Collaboration is when you are actually making objects together. Goes beyond conversation. Social media –when you have the whole ecosystem of sharing, creating, and collaborating. Social media needs context and filtering tools when it takes off, but this is a rich man’s problems.
• Bridging the gap to the real world includes location, calendaring, etc.
• Let the community elevate people and the content they value.
• Enable people to make connections.

Learn More from Christian Crumlish

Recently, Jared Spool interviewed Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone on the realm of social interfaces. They discussed the huge collection of social design elements their book Designing Social Interfaces, contains, whether you should build a community on your site or leverage an existing community, and how the growth in social media affects new mediums like mobile. Hear their podcast, Crumlish and Malone Design the Social In.

Also, Christian will be in Minneapolis and Seattle, and Erin will be in Philadelphia, for the Web App Masters Tour presenting Designing the Social In. He’s just one of the thirteen Masters. Read all about the Tour at www.UIETour.com.

Until April 19, you can register for any of the Tour cities for $795 when you use the promotion code TOURBLOG. Learn more about the tour at www.UIETour.com

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Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone

As soon as we saw Erin Malone and Christian Crumlish’s new book, Designing Social Interfaces, we knew you’d want to hear about their rich collection of social patterns and principles. An outgrowth from creating the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library, the book is a perfect repository for anyone planning, designing, and building social aspects into their applications.

The core fundamentals of people wanting to share, people wanting to connect to people, people wanting to feel like they have a social space to be a part of, aren’t going to change. —Erin

We’re excited to have both authors with us on the UIE Web App Masters Tour and we made sure to schedule this podcast with them so we could discuss the realm of social interfaces.

Jared Spool discusses several points with Erin and Christian, including,

• How the book became a huge collection of social design elements and how people are using Designing Social Interfaces in the wild
• Could a better understanding of social design patterns have helped Google launch Buzz with less blowback?
• Expecting to build a community on your site, versus leveraging existing communities (for example, Facebook Connect)
• The growth of social in new contexts (mobile, new audiences)

We tried to drive down to a bedrock level of principles of human behavioral drives and needs and tradeoffs that are fundamental to the dynamics of the system. If there are new trends… that part can be updated without throwing out the idea that you need to model people in your system. —Christian

Tune in for more from Erin and Christian, and join all of us at the Web App Masters tour to hear their Designing the Social In session, where they’ll highlight many real-life examples to kick start your app’s social life.

Want to learn more from Christian and Erin? See their session– Designing the Social In at the Web App Masters Tour

Recently, we’ve been hanging out with Stephen Anderson. Stephen makes it his business to explore how serious applications can be fun and engaging. The more we talk to him, the more examples we see of fascinating and novel approaches to entice people to use our designs.

In today’s UIEtips, we explore some of Stephen’s thinking with a fresh look at how the elements of game play can serve our business requirements. We look at examples from four businesses to see different approaches to integrating the elements of play into great user experiences. I’m sure you’ll find it interesting.

Read Stephen’s article, Designing with the Elements of Play.

Stephen’s discussion of Serious Play was one of the highlights of the recent San Diego stop on the UIE Web App Masters Tour. Today’s article is just the tip of the iceberg — he has way more insights than we can fit here. Don’t miss them (or the other great Web App Masters) in our upcoming stops in Minneapolis, Philadelphia, or Seattle. Details at UIETour.com.

Have you experimented with game play in your applications? We’d love to hear your experiences? Share them below.

Julie Zhuo

The designers at Facebook try hard to make Facebook users happy. It’s a hard-to-please audience, and there’s 350 million of them. As Facebook’s Product Design Manager, Julie is at the front of the storm, designing for the site that’s grown from 8 million college students to its current worldwide audience.

She’ll be sharing some of her team’s successful and not-so-successful design experiences, so we can all learn from their experience. The interesting part is that many of the problems they face are just like the ones we face, and their solutions are quite creative. You’ll hear Julie’s experiences at our San Diego stop on the tour.

Christian Crumlish

Many web applications, whether on intranets or public facing, involve making connections with other people. From the address book and contact list, to messaging and content sharing, we see more web apps helping people communicate and collaborate.

We can’t think of a better person, to introduce social features into your web-based applications, than Christian. Working with his co-author, Erin Malone, they have compiled an amazing library of patterns in their new book, Designing Social Interfaces. We’re excited to have him as one of our masters on this tour and can’t wait to hear what wisdom he’ll be sharing with us. We’re fortunate that Christian will be at each stop of the tour.

Stay tuned. We should have more additions to the program tomorrow. And we’re adding more to the site every day, as we get ready for the launch in a few days! Watch along at uietour.com.

Here’s the facts:

We’re going to 4 cities between March and July, 2010: San Diego, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, and Seattle. We love these cities for the vibrant tech communities.

We’ve put together a team of leading designers of today’s top web-based applications. We call them the Masters. In each city, we’ll have them unleash two days of inspiring presentations. These folks are the best in the business and we’re thrilled you’ll get the chance to learn first-hand from their experience.

Who are the Masters?

I can tell you about two of them today:

Doug Bowman

What do Google, Wired, Blogger, Capgemini, Mighty Goods, and Adaptive Path all have in common? They’ve all seen the fine work of Doug Bowman, one of the most influential designers on the web. Now, Doug is the Creative Director of Twitter, where he’s helping change the world, one hundred and forty characters at a time. Doug will be sharing his design experiences at the San Diego and Seattle tour locations.

Stephen Anderson

Stephen gave a mind-blowing presentation at the 2009 IA Summit. He discussed how the basics behind game mechanics can help users become more engaged in other types of applications. The minute I walked out of his talk, I knew we had to have him at one of our events. His writing at PoetPainter.com, his presentations, and his work for clients, such as Nokia, Frito-Lay, Sabre Travel Network, and Chesapeake Energy all demonstrate the new insights he brings to application design. We’re thrilled that he’ll be presenting his thoughts in all four cities.

By the way, I’ll be opening and closing each of the events, so you’ll have a chance to hear from me, in addition to Doug, Stephen, and the other presenters we’re lining up.

We’re putting everything about the event at www.uietour.com. Stay tuned for more news…

We love to talk to Steve Mulder (from Molecular) and Riccardo La Rosa (from Isobar) about building out a Web 2.0 strategy and incorporating elements, such as social features and highly-interactive elements to the design.

Steve and Riccardo work with mainstream organizations, which may not be as familiar as, say, a Silicon Valley startup with what the state-of-the-art is for these types of features. In this interview, they told me about the solutions they worked on with Reebok (a sports apparel company) and HumanaOne (a direct-to-consumer health insurance company). We talked about the challenges they faced on these projects and what they needed to do to overcome them.

During the podcast, we discussed how to determine what features to build, how to tell if the features are working as expected, and how results changed over time. We talked about how starting small and iterating is most successful, but not an easy sell in many situations. You’ll want to listen to hear how they overcame this challenge and other Web 2.0 adventures they had.

Enjoy the podcast? Well, you can join Steve and Riccardo for their UIE Web App Summit full-day workshop, Web 2.0 Strategy and Design, and learn how to apply the elements of social media, openness, rich interfaces, and emerging digital interactions to your designs.

At the beginning of this month, we had Joshua Porter in the office to present his Design for Sign-up talk. Designing for sign-up should be simple, yet it’s often the most challenging area of your design. Josh had some great ideas on how to increase the ease of sign-up and how to motivate your users to want to.

We got back together with Josh to follow-up on the seminar so we could answer a number of viewer’s questions that we didn’t have time for in the seminar.

In this podcast, we discussed,

• Best practices for web form design
• Suggestions for user testing sign-up during the design phase
• Placement and design for sign-in forms
• The role of immediate engagement, delaying sign-up till after the user is engaged
• The 9× effect and it’s application and implications for sign-up
• Writing copy that encourages sign-up

There’s a lot of great stuff in this show. Even if you missed the live seminar, we think you’ll get a lot out of this interview with Josh.

In the podcast, Josh recommended reading this Harvard Business Review article, Eager Sellers and Stony Buyers by John T. Gourville

We’re interested in hearing your comments on sign up, feel free to discuss in the comments!

This week, UIE turns 19 years old. Over the years, we’ve seen technology come and go, features grow and shrink, and interaction styles dramatically change.

What used to be just a person interacting with a screen has become something more — people interacting with other people, using the computer as a moderator. This has enhanced e-commerce (as seen by Amazon’s reviews), brought families and communities together (with tools like Flickr’s photo sharing and commenting), and enabled new ways to keep in touch with people important to us (as with Facebook and MySpace.)

As with the development of any system, it’s easy to focus on the mechanics of making the technology work. Just allowing people to add reviews or establish connections is the first step.

Yet, perfecting the mechanics won’t get you a service that delights the users. That has to come from something more. Something that takes into account how people interact with each other and how businesses can thrive on that interaction.

In today’s UIEtips, Josh Porter gives us the continuation of his analysis of the common pitfalls of building social web applications. Josh has done a fabulous job looking at what it takes to survive in this new world.

Read today’s UIEtips article.

Are you implementing social web applications into your designs? Have you encountered any of these pitfalls? If so, what you have you done to avoid them? Join the discussion below about this week’s topic below.

This is Josh’s last article as a member of User Interface Engineering, as he has recently left the team to start his own business, Bokardo Design. Over the last 5 years, Josh has contributed tons to our thinking on Search, e-commerce, web apps, and developing social applications. He’s been responsible for our site design, the e-commerce application that funds our research and events, and our blog. Most importantly, he’s been part of the life-blood of what makes UIE what it is. We won’t be the same without him.

Just because Josh is leaving our offices doesn’t mean he’s leaving our life. UIE will be one of his first clients, as he continues to help us with the design of our site. However, he now has the opportunity to help other organizations with their sites. (You can contact him at porter@bokardo.com if you’d like to see if he could help your organization.) He’ll also be presenting at the upcoming UI12 conference and as part of our upcoming podcasts. It’s likely you’ll hear more of his thoughts in UIE Virtual Seminars and articles. Of course, you can follow his thinking on his blog, Bokardo.

When teams make critical feature changes in their designs, there’s always a risk of backlash from loyal users. That’s what happened to Facebook, the social networking site, a few months ago. Facebook’s designers created the mini feed, an exciting new feature that promised to offer users a vastly improved experience. Instead, the feature resulted in loyal users getting angry and frustrated with the change.

How could Facebook’s designers have prevented this backlash from users? How can you ensure that you don’t experience a similar fallout when launching a new feature? In this week’s UIEtips article, I discuss what led to the Facebook disaster and how design teams can avoid similar results with their own sites.

Read today’s UIEtips article.

How does your organization handle the launch of new features or products? Has your team experienced any backlash when launching new design features? Join the discussion below about this week’s topic below.

[If you find this article interesting, you'll definitely want to attend this year's UI12 Conference, where I'll present my full-day seminar: New Perspectives in User Experience Design. In this seminar, I'll be sharing my outlook on the state of our field and discuss UIE's latest research.]

This week Josh and I talk about all the ways we get in trouble. Whether its speaking in public or writing on our blogs, sometimes we kick up a sandstorm unintentionally.

» I attended a conference for the Society of Technical Communication. While I was attending the conference, I blogged that I saw technical writing as an art I see slowly morphing away. Is it telling that the two most popular topics at the annual conference are user experience and interaction design?

» Josh has designers and artists riled up with his blog series on Design is not Art. Both sides are represented in his comments, from designers who think design done right is art, and from designers who think design reveals while art conceals.

» We also discussed the new FaceBook Platform Apps. These are an interesting case study as more sites consider making a public API to expand their offerings. APIs create an ecology where some sites can expand their usefulness, while other shops can extend their services to an existing community instead fighting the uphill battle of creating one from scratch.

We may create more questions than we answer, but never the less it was an interesting discussion. I think you’ll enjoy it.

In the last couple of years, web sites and apps focusing on social interactions have become increasingly popular. We’ve been seeing more and more designs that allow users to collaborate and share what they’re doing with others, including such popular sites as MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, and Craigslist.

But only recently have design teams started to understand the complexities of dealing with thousands or millions of users who want to connect with their peers and coworkers in new and exciting ways. Several prominent incidents, such as the Facebook newsfeed blowup, have shown just how complex the social issues are.

In this week’s UIEtips, UIE’s Joshua Porter, an expert on the issues related to Social Design, has written a fantastic article outlining many of the common pitfalls that lead to failure when building social applications. Today’s UIEtips article was originally published on Josh’s blog, Bokardo. If you haven’t yet checked out the Bokardo blog, I highly suggest you take a look if you’re interested in Social Design. Josh is *the expert* we turn to at UIE when researching these types of issues.

Read today’s UIEtips article.

Is your organization starting to focus on Social Design? How are you handling the complexities or connecting your users in new and exciting ways? As always, I’d love to hear what you’re doing. Join the discussion below.

[If you'd like to hear more insights from Joshua Porter on Social Design, you'll definitely want to check out his UIE Virtual Seminar, Social Design: Designing for the Social Lives of Users.]

The Josh and Jared Show: Episode #2
with Joshua Porter and Jared Spool
Brian Christiansen, UIE Podcast Producer
Recorded: April 26, 2007 at the studios of User Interface Engineering
Duration: 49 Min | File size: 23 MB
[ Click here to subscribe to our podcast via iTunes. This link will launch the iTunes application. ]
[ Click here to subscribe with other podcast applications. ]

Welcome to the second episode of the Josh and Jared Show, where Joshua Porter and I get together and discuss the interesting happenings in the world of experience design.

This episode touched upon:

» The design of MySpace and big reactions we hear

» The effect of life stages on design, judging value for different age groups

» Virb: “a beautiful MySpace” or “MySpace done tastefully?” Will it catch on?

» The communal feeling of Flickr and Twitter

» Social Design field research: What kind of social interaction is already happening?

» Starting from scratch vs. mining things like Del.icio.us tags for pre-existing useful content

We invite you to participate in the show. Send us your thoughts and questions. You can post them as a comment to this blog post, send them via email, or use the feedback feature of uie.com. If you’re really adventurous, send us a short (30 seconds or less) audio comment as an MP3 file and we’ll try to include it in a future episode.

In just the past couple of years, we’ve seen more and more designs that allow users to collaborate and share what they’re doing with others. Web sites and applications such as MySpace, Flickr, and Craigslist, are becoming increasingly popular.

One of the underlying reasons for their popularity is because they all focus on Social Design, an area of design that deals with the activities, behaviors, and motivations of people who work and play together through software interfaces. Each of these social applications connect users in new and exciting ways.

In this week’s UIEtips, we’ve republished Joshua Porter’s recent Brain Sparks blog post discussing how organizations can benefit from incorporating social features into their designs. I’ve decided to share the post with all of our UIEtips readers because I think Josh’s commentary on the importance of Social Design is just too important to miss.

As always, please share your thoughts with us. Have you ever wondered why sites such as MySpace and Flickr are so popular? Have you considered incorporating social features into your design? Leave your thoughts and join the discussion below.

Read today’s UIEtips article.

[If you find this article interesting, you'll definitely want to attend the User Interface 12 Conference this November 5-8, where Joshua Porter will present at UIE's Showcase Seminar, Usability 2007: The Latest Perspectives. In this seminar, Josh will share his latest research on Social Design practices.]

Virtual Seminar attendee Paul Baker asks:

“What sort of contextual research might you do when designing a social site?”

We have found that research methods won’t change much when designing a social site, but the line of inquiry will. So we tend to use tried-and-true research tools: interviews, user tests, and field studies.

The big difference when moving to social design research is the focus of observation: in addition to wondering what activities people are doing and what is necessary for their completion, we increase focus on the social interactions that influence why they’re doing so.

A major insight of social design is that when people make decisions they rarely act alone. Their social groups, friends, and family have a huge influence on their behavior. As software becomes more a part of our lifestyle, social influence will play a larger part in how we use it.

This shouldn’t be surprising as it is easy to think of the last recommendation, suggestion, or pointer we received. Thus, these simple items are the object of our inquiry.

Here’s an example of how we might focus an interview on social aspects:

Imagine you’re interviewing someone about looking for an apartment on the Web. You ask them the usual questions, where they go, what sites they visit, what information is important to them, what they like and don’t like. Most of the discussion will deal with what is important to them as they fulfill this activity.

At some point, unless the person is truly anti-social, someone else will enter into the conversation. Maybe it’s their brother who recommended they search in a certain neighborhood in the Back Bay of Boston. Or their boyfriend who says to make sure everything that in the apartment is fixed before moving in. This is where the social part comes in.

Most of the time these people are treated as outsiders to research. They are flat characters, so to speak, who show up only for a minute. But when thinking about this from a more social perspective, these people are primary actors because they’re influencing the person as much as any software is. They are helping to define why the person is doing what they’re doing.

So the line of questioning turns toward them. We ask more about their influence. Did you take your brother’s suggestion? Do you often take his suggestion, or just in cases involving this subject? What makes him such a good person to listen to concerning this subject? Whose suggestion did you end up going with, and why?

In addition, we want to get a sense of how they communicated. Was it over the phone? Email? IM? During a face-to-face conversation? Did they get a recommendation from a blog? How are they getting their information?

Using questions like this help us figure out how this person assigns trust to those around them. It also helps us tease out important factors in their decision making process that involve other people.

Once we have a clear picture of how a person makes decisions in a certain area, we can compare them with others. We’ve found that there are usually trends in how this works. These trends feed into our design.

So if we were creating a site to support this activity, we might create a “apartment hunters” model in our software that allows people to connect with landlords based on criteria their social network suggested was important. We also know that apartment hunting doesn’t happen frequently, so we might lean away from a “friends” feature for the time being. But we might also focus more on archiving information over a longer term so that folks coming to the site don’t have to tap into their social network as much, instead relying on the accumulated wisdom of others.

This is just an example of how this might work. Your research will probably take you in some other, more interesting, direction. The key to doing social design research is to figure out the relationships between users and their social group, and how that affects their behavior and decision-making.

The runaway successes of YouTube, MySpace, and Flickr have completely changed the landscape of design. One huge change is the rise in socially-enabled web applications, applications that connect users in new and more explicit ways. Witness the trend of “going social” on news sites, where they give their community the ability to comment on and even participate in the news. The design team behind the USAToday.com web site, for example, recently enhanced their site with new social features including comments, reviews, discussion forums, and the ability to make recommendations. Just this past week ABCNews did the same.

So what are the core benefits of making this change? Why invest in social features? Although the benefits will vary depending on the business and the audience, here are some core benefits of investing in social features that apply broadly across many areas:

Amplify Customer Opinion

Humans are social animals. Therefore, it is likely that there is social activity happening around your content or service whether you want it to or not. People are sharing their stories, complimenting about what’s good, complaining about what’s bad even if you aren’t listening. By adding social features to your web site, you’re enabling them to do it in a way that you can listen to.

Companies with strong products users love will help them share those experiences with others. For example, something as simple as a “share this” feature on a news site will allow people to let someone else know about what they find interesting…amplifying their enthusiasm about it.

Similarly, companies with products users hate will have that amplified as well. If someone posts a horror story like Jeff Jarvis did in his famous “Dell Hell” blog posts, lots of people will get wind of it.

This is a crucial situation brought to bear by social features…when users complain you are given a clear choice: either ignore that feedback or act on it in a positive way. Companies that treat it as an opportunity for improvement will probably improve. Companies that treat it as a public airing of dirty laundry will probably suffer…

Data, Data, and more Data

Perhaps the least talked about benefit of social features is that they are wonderful precursors to a data-driven design strategy. Every time someone saves, shares, or comments on something, you have more data to go on regarding what they find valuable.

We’ve been doing this at UIE for some time. When someone shares an article at UIE we count it. The 10 most-shared articles on UIE.com, therefore, tell us what our readers find “share-worthy”. This is an important metric for us, as we use it to plan future pieces.

The benefits of data-driven design are huge for teams having trouble separating personal opinion from project decision-making. (we find very few teams where this isn’t the case). When decisions are based on actual data, they become much easier to make. Politics fall by the wayside and good design practices often emerge as a result.

Reduce Support Costs

Social features help reduce support costs by recording help issues publicly and letting customers help themselves. Talk to any support call specialist and you’ll find that their lives can be very repetitive, answering the same questions over and over again. This doesn’t have to be the case. When you add social features like support bulletin boards, for example, most of the conversations are recorded for all to see. Users can then search for the topic that they’re interested in, and if someone has had a similar experience previously they can start reading there. Bulletin boards, of course, have been around even longer than the Web itself. But making them public and searchable makes them valuable resources for everyone.

Additionally, systems like this allow users to help themselves by giving them the power to answer other people’s questions. Sometimes the users of the products are as knowledgeable about a product as the support people are. Social features allow them to help out and make the community stronger as a result.

Some sites like Apple.com’s Support Site have more advanced features whereby people can rate the responses they are given to their questions. That way, if one response by the community really helped the person who asked the question, it will be flagged and easily found by future readers. This helps users filter out bad responses, further reducing support costs.

Engendering Trust

Opening up communication channels with customers engenders trust, and that can be priceless. Sites that might otherwise be seen as closed-up and insular can open up communication channels where none existed before.

When you implement social features, it is a signal that you care what people have to say. It declares “we are here and we’re listening” attitude. Putting comments on a news article, like USAToday.com did, suggests that they are interested in letting people voice their opinion about the news.

Sometimes just telling someone their opinion counts is enough to engender trust. They’re much more likely to give you the benefit of the doubt when the sky turns dark. Of course, backing up your features by actually listening is necessary for the long-term health of your site, so the activity doesn’t end with implementation.

Going Social is a Long-term Experience Design Strategy

In addition to the explicit benefits for the site owner, implementing social features means building a community around shared experiences. The notion of “shared experiences” difficult to define, but the benefits of increased participation and caring are clear. People respond best to communities where they believe they’ll find like-minded people and where they feel their ideas and opinions matter. This trust is the real benefit of social software.

Therefore, adding social features isn’t so much a leap of faith as it is an investment in a long-term experience design strategy. Of course, the costs of building social features aren’t negligible and the return on investment might not be immediate. It may take months before a social support site starts to take over support activities from a call center. Therefore, it is critical to plan out the maintenance and support of social features over time.

When all the benefits are combined together and your customers now see your site as being run by human beings instead of nameless droids, and they feel invested in the site, you’ll realize that social features are only surfacing what exists already, and it’s really just a human-centered way forward.

At UIE we’ve been watching social sites for a while now, and we’ve seen many social features, including the ones added by USAToday, become commonplace over the last few years. It comes as no surprise that large organizations are seeing the value of connecting their users in ever-beneficial ways like they’re trying to do at USAToday.

But even though big sites adding many social features at a time draws lots of attention, there is one site that is way ahead of everyone else, offering a myriad of social features that eclipses the field, hands down. That site is Amazon.com. Now, we’re not feature counters by any means, but we have seen the features on Amazon provide a tremendous amount of value to users during testing of the site. The product reviews, for example, are a huge advantage Amazon holds over other e-commerce sites…people really trust the reviews there compared to everywhere else. I wrote about this phenomenon in The Amazon Effect.

But just how social is Amazon, you ask? Well, pretty darn social. In a slide from the presentation I gave at the UIE Web App Summit, I outlined 11 social features on the iPod product page at Amazon. The slide wasn’t very effective, however, as it only contained small screen-shots of the features laid on top of one another. It didn’t show the scope of what Amazon was doing with social features.

I’ve now found a better way to visualize what Amazon is doing. The following is a screen-shot of the entire iPod product page at Amazon, with 16! social features highlighted throughout the page:

This is a clear indication that Amazon is making a huge investment in social features…and suggests that maybe it’s Amazon who should be getting the big press. Part of the reason why they don’t receive lots of press, of course, is that Amazon releases features one-at-a-time…slow enough that it creeps up on us.