design

neighborhoods and subcultures in social design

by erin on 12/16/2009

in Designing Social Interfaces,Interaction design,social patterns

In writing our book, Designing Social Interfaces, we challenged ourselves to creating a social pattern language, much like Christopher Alexander created a pattern language for building and architecture. We have followed the evolution of design patterns but looking back into A Pattern Language, there are some concepts that Alexander talks about that are directly applicable [...]

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Slides from our talk

by erin on 09/20/2009

in Conferences,Designing Social Interfaces,Interaction design,social patterns

Our talk at Idea09 touched on a few key steps for building social experiences, a few of the most salient principles and a handful of the anti-patterns covered in the book. A 40 minute talk barely taps into the breadth of content from the book, but it’s a nice teaser. Designing Social Interfaces: 5 steps, [...]

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Welcome Area

by erin on 08/06/2009

in Designing Social Interfaces,Interaction design,social patterns

Many of the patterns in Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language offer advice and food for thought when designing the social experience. Pattern #149 in A Pattern Language is “Reception Welcomes You” which I find quite relevant when thinking about designing for the web. It is applicable for the social experience but is also appropriate for [...]

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Expanding the toolset to include Fireworks

by erin on 01/05/2009

in Information Architecture,Interaction design,Tools

As I have made the transition to consulting and back to hands on work, I find that the tools I have been using are insufficient for my needs. I can wireframe and create flows and use cases very easily with Omnigraffle, but I find it lacking for creating interactive prototypes. I have investigated Axure and [...]

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Yahoo! Design Stencils

by erin on 06/05/2008

in Developer Network,Evangelism,Information Architecture,Interaction design,My job,Pattern Library,Yahoo!

Earlier this year, as part of our workshop at the IA Summit, we made a robust set of design stencils that map to the Yahoo! Pattern Library and the Yahoo! User Interface Library. These stencils were made for Omnigraffle, Visio, Adobe Illustrator and PNG files for Photoshop and SVG for other applications. We have now [...]

Y! OS Finally Announced

by erin on 05/03/2008

in Interaction design,My job,UED,Yahoo!

Last year, my team was working in the Platform division and working on creating the social media platform for Yahoo! This included components related to identity, how a person is identified across the yahoo! network, reputation, relationships and something we call vitality – a person’s updates and lifestream of activity across the network or internet. [...]

Graceful Interfaces

by erin on 05/01/2008

in Interaction design

Over the last couple of days, I have done some online shopping and been pleasantly surprised by a couple of small interface behaviors that made my life easier as a shopper. Amazon [http://www.amazon.com] When presented with the login screen – the information is already pre-filled (I saved it in my browser) – but the radio [...]

New Yahoo! Developer Network design rolling out

by erin on 04/11/2008

in Developer Network,My job,Yahoo!

Our first batch of the newly designed site rolled out today! It looks great and is the collaborative work of an incredibly talented team. Lucas Pettinati who is the UX lead for the project, Stephan Douris who created a beautiful visual language for the site, Jono Kane who prototyped the hell out of things and [...]

the importance of a common language

by erin on 11/20/2007

in Information design,My job,UED

I am working on writing a set of use cases for a new project and as I am writing it occurs to me that the team I am working with calls all the different parts of the site and the content different things. I have been struggling with how to write these use cases because [...]

New job, new blog

by erin on 11/06/2007

in Developer Network,My job,UED,Yahoo!

As of this week I have new and different responsibilities at Yahoo! I now head up the ued team responsible for the Yahoo! Developer Network. Having been the creator and driver of the Pattern Library, this is a nice logical next step. Open is a big bet for us and creating a great environment for [...]