Social Design: Designing for the Social Lives of Users

Would you like to have lifetime access to the most groundbreaking thinking in the world of Experience Design? Instead of traveling to a training course, you and your colleagues can hear the latest insights on the most important design topics right from your office.

Watching a UIE Virtual Seminar couldn't be simpler. You'll view the presentation in your web browser and listen to it with your computer speakers. (We've tested the seminar using Firefox and Internet Explorer on both Macs and PCs with great success.) All you'll need is a web browser equipped with the Macromedia Flash Player (version 6 or newer) and a connection to the Internet.

 

Seminar DescriptionWeb sites and apps focusing on social interactions are growing like wildfire. MySpace, Facebook, and Craigslist all sit in the top twenty most used web sites in the world. What is the secret to their success? What can we learn from them to apply to our own designs?

 

To tackle these questions, Joshua Porter, UIE’s Director of Web Development, has put together an information-packed presentation that delves into the common traits of these successful web sites: they all focus on Social Design, or design that focuses on the social lives of users.

Social Design deals with the activities, behaviors, and motivations of people who work and play together through software interfaces. In recent years, we've seen more and more designs that allow users to collaborate and share what they're doing with others. But only recently have design teams started to understand the complexities of dealing with thousands (and sometimes millions) of users who want to connect with their peers and coworkers in new and exciting ways. Several prominent incidents, such as the Facebook newsfeed blowup, have shown just how complex the social issues are.