ADL Social Pattern Library

Design Principles and Patterns to help mitigate online hate

Project Goals

  • Provides overarching design principles that keep anti-hate design top of mind for social platform UX and product teams
  • Builds on the product recommendations work ADL CTS done over the last couple of years
  • Calls attention to the research for many of these recommendations that support their actual success in mitigating hate

Target Audience

  • User Experience designers working on social platforms and game UX
  • Front end developers building these interactions
  • Product managers defining business goals around these interactions
  • Trust & Safety and/or Policy teams managing user moderation and tools in the platforms

Homepage of the ADL Social Pattern Library
The library launched with six overarching principles.
Example pattern – Hateful Post Interstitial
The library launched with 26 patterns to start
Example pattern – Posting Comments and Content This pattern included research from PenAmerica.

I wasthe project lead for the ADL Social Pattern library. Much of the work over three years involved running product brainstorms with UX interns, policy colleagues and other team members within the ADL Center for Technology and Society, guiding and conducting research for each pattern, managing UX interns and reviewing their writing and design work, writing patterns, editing patterns, collating appropriate references and collaborating with other civil society partners including PenAmerica.

The library includes patterns, principles and topics. Each pattern is associated with related topics and principles and the user can toggle between any of these categories.

Additionally, I curated a group of industry advisors who were working UX professionals, social interaction experts, researchers and product managers who regularly gave us feedback on the library elements.

I was also responsible for socializing the library with different university faculty to develop curriculum with the material and for developing relationships with industry user experience design teams working on social platforms and online games.

Activities for each Pattern:

  • Break down each major user interaction flow into their smallest bits of micro-interactions.
  • Research the goal and interaction across mainstream press, user experience design best practices and patterns, academic research, civil society and non-profit research
  • Write the pattern with emphasis on how the recommendation mitigates hate, how it works, why a platform would use the recommendation, advantages and disadvantages.
  • Competitive analysis of the recommended interaction across multiple platforms. Screenshot examples if they exist.
  • Develop Figma interactive example of the recommendation.
  • Cite references

Press Release for the launch of the project

Team Makeup

UX Design & Project Lead: Erin Malone
UX Design Intern 2022-2023: Stella Sun
UX Design Intern 2021: Anton Castro
UX Design Intern 2020 & Site Designer: Ryan Koble

Early Response from the UX Community about the Library