We got the final mechanical of the book cover in color a couple of days ago and then shortly after word that the entire book was sent to press. A couple of weeks from now I should be holding it in my hand. In the meantime, here’s the front and back cover.
A couple of weeks from now I will be attending the IDEA conference, put on by the IA Institute, for the first time. Over the years I have heard about the previous versions of this conference but was never able to attend (working for the man, I was only allowed one conference a year and…
The Yahoo! Pattern library has launched a new design – to match the revamped design of the Yahoo! Developer Network. This was a project that originally started way before I left Yahoo! and was supposed to be part of the YDN overhaul project I led. But life and other projects often get in the way…
It’s that time of year to slog through the long list of thousands of ideas for SXSW presentation. Fortunately, you can cut to the chase and click this link right now to vote for my idea. Christian and I want to bring the Social Mania – Social Patterns game to SXSW. Relief from panels and…
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…
My coauthor for the book, Christian Crumlish, has recently published an article in the ASIST Bulletin in which he shares some of the principles we talk about in the new book. Additionally he fleshes out the framework we cover and talks about the kinds of patterns found in each node of the architecture. It’s a…
A few weeks ago, I attended the UX Book club event here in San Francisco. The book in discussion was A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander. It was a lively discussion and drifted back and forth between architecture, the Yahoo! Pattern Library, our Social Patterns collection, patterns in interaction design and the motivations behind that…
This past week, we conducted a two day working session with one of our clients. In this working session we created a set of Experience Themes using the method presented by Cindy Chastain at this past year’s IA Summit.
With the delivery of the book manuscript to our editor and it moving into copy editing and production, we have started thinking about some of the associated things we want to have with the book. One of them is a large poster showing the ecosystem of the social landscape. We had a couple of drafts…
Our book stub is finally on Amazon. It’s really real – the whole process is surreal to me. But you can pre-order the Designing Social Interfaces book on Amazon. We are targeting a September 2009 release and are just about to enter revision mode. We received really good feedback from our technical reviewers and we…
Social Patterns Talk – Web 2.0 version View more presentations from Erin Malone. We gave a 3 hour workshop this morning at Web 2.0. Expanded info about the taxonomy. We created 5 scenarios with possible patterns and examples from the wild. This is super expanded from the talk we gave in Memphis.
In Jesse James Garrett’s closing plenary at the IA Summit he challenged us to consider a way to critique our work and to develop a language of critique. Other disciplines, architecture, design, art, theater, even science, have developed and evolved a language by which the field can discern good work versus bad, by which members…
Designing Social Interfaces View more presentations from Erin Malone. Christian Crumlish and I brought out some of the material we have been working on for you book and gave a talk at the IA Summit. We tried to provide a handful of real world scenarios with which a designer might find themselves in and then…
We had a core conversation at SXSW on Sunday which was quite interesting to me and I hope interesting to people attending. The audience brought up some great questions and we spent a bit of time talking about ethics which we don’t talk about in depth in the book other than reminding designers to think…
At the Interactions 09 conference in Vancouver, Luke Wroblewski gave an interesting talk about the processes he and his team used to redesign the Yahoo! homepage. It was an interesting talk not so much for the outcome but for how he applied and talked about methods, best practices and patterns. His use of these kinds…