Web 2.0 NY – Designing Social Interfaces Workshop

I attended Web 2.0 NY Expo this past week as a workshop presenter. I took the talk that Christian and I did at IDEA 09 and that I did at IxDA SF and fleshed it out into a 3 hour, hands on workshop. I believe it went well. workshop attendees workshop attendees working on an exercise Here are my slides:

One the new things I did, was take leftover cards from the Social Mania game and use them as flash cards (our original idea). I gave each participant a set of cards – each with 3-5 social objects, a demographic, a couple of principles, patterns in each category and an anti-pattern or two. These cards were then used by the group to create and build a product around, or the teams could use a real world problem if they chose.

Each section of the workshop used some of the cards and built on the previous section. The physical objects provided direct things to talk about and created an immediacy for discussion. At the end of each exercise one or two groups presented what they were building and answered some questions related to the section we had just completed.

The other thing I noticed about using the cards was they acted as a social lubricant for groups of people who didn’t know each other. The cards have a lot of uses beyond the game and make a nice companion to the book for brainstorming with teams or with clients or with engineers or whoever you are working with on a social project.

I want to evolve the cards into a set of flash cards as well that we can sell, give away or even potentially bundle at some point. I think it takes these abstract concepts from the book and puts them in a form that is physical and tactile and in some ways, even though the content is the same, brings the ideas to life in a way that reading just doesn’t do.

Anyway – thanks so much to all the people who attended my workshop and participated eagerly. Your participation made it so much more dynamic and interesting than I could have planned on my own.

erin
current: experience matters design :: senior level interaction design and systems strategy consulting former partner, tangible user experience; Yahoo! founder of the public and internal Yahoo! pattern library. design director of ued teams responsible for designing solutions across key yahoo! platforms: social media, personalization, membership and vertical search.