As humans, we’re a social species, so it’s no surprise our applications are becoming social too. Our users want to connect, share, and collaborate, using the data and tools we’re designing. Building in social components adds new challenges and requirements: protecting privacy, curtailing inappropriate behavior, and encouraging participation. As we planned the topics for the [...]

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.

Woody Allen once said, “There is no scientific evidence to support the notion that life should be taken seriously.” When it comes to designing applications, Woody was right on the mark. 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 [...]

Hot off the presses! We’ve just finalized two more Masters for the UIE Web App Masters Tour, Julie Zhuo and Christian Crumlish. We’re thrilled they can join us. 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 [...]

This is exciting. We’re putting the finishing touches on our upcoming UIE Web App Masters Tour. An event this momentous takes months to make happen. And now, we’re just days away from having every detail lined up. Here’s the facts: We’re going to 4 cities between March and July, 2010: San Diego, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, and [...]

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. Listen to their stories of helping major brands integrate social and highly-interactive experiences.

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.

UIEtips 7/31/07: Common Pitfalls of Social Web Applications, Part II 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 [...]

UIEtips 7/16/07: Learning from the Facebook Mini-Feed Disaster 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 [...]

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. STC2007, Art vs. Design, and the Facebook API platform.