The information architecture of social experience design: Five principles, five anti‐patterns and 96 patterns (in three buckets)

摘要

Designing and building a successful social website or application is no mean feat. Adding a social dimension to an existing experience is trickier still. Nevertheless, the skills to do so are well worth cultivating, as the ubiquitous, pervasive, massively interconnected world of the Internet and allied digital networks, such as mobile SMS (short message service) connections, have unlocked a growing panoply of opportunities for social relationships, remote presence, real-time interactions and the capacity for self-organized groups of people to coordinate their behavior and collaborate on changing the world. So when your boss, client, teacher or mentor drops a project on your lap and asks you to “add social to it,” where do you start? I'm thinking you start with the information architecture and in particular your conceptual models. The pattern language that Erin Malone and I are working on (inspired by Christopher Alexander, Ward Cunningham, the Gang of Four, Jenifer Tidwell, Matt Leacock and Bill Scott, among others), describes patterns we've observed roughly sorted to focus on three major elements of our concept model: people, objects and relationships. Over several years, and with input from many people, we gathered a large list of potential patterns to investigate, and so far we've codified 96 of them, with 56 other principles and practices, and five major don'ts, classified as anti-patterns. Pave the Cowpaths Talk Like a Person Play Well with Others Learn from Games Respect the Ethical Dimension Pave the Cowpaths. Pave the Cowpaths means, essentially, look where the paths are already being formed by behavior and then formalize them, rather than creating some idealized path structure that ignores history and tradition, human nature, geometry and ergonomics, and common sense. Sometimes this principle is applied on campuses — and sometimes a rear-guard “keep off the grass” action is fought instead to no avail. In the design of social interfaces, this rubric has two applications. The first is simply to do your ethnographic homework — study some of your potential customers. How do they do what they do today? Yes, of course, the thing you want them to do will be better, but is it really entirely different? Can you offer people a way to continue doing most of the things they're comfortable doing today as you introduce new possibilities into their lives, or are you really going to insist on them changing everything at once? The second application of Pave the Cowpaths comes later in the lifecycle of your site, when you've got a user base and they start doing things you never anticipated. Often the impulse is to stamp out these rogue behaviors and enforce draconian rules requiring only the behaviors you had planned for. This course of action really only makes sense if the behaviors you are trying to stamp out are truly destructive or evil. There are many anecdotes about thriving social sites that killed themselves off by legislating against fun and forcing their users into exile to find the activities they had been improvising “incorrectly” in the site they had to leave. A better plan is to support the behaviors your users are engaged in. Let your users tell you what the best and highest use of your interface may turn out to be. Don't be so arrogant as to assume you know everything about how the social dynamics you've unleashed need to evolve. Talk Like a Person. When many of us started putting together personal sites, art projects and other creative or informal objects starting in the 1990s, the air of informality online was palpable, but when business came online a bit later in the decade, many of the first business-oriented websites reproduced the remote, inanimate, almost robotic corporate voice you tend to find in annual reports and catalog copy. Even there, the more savvy enterprises appreciated the value of communicating to potential customers in a human voice. The corporation has always been a mask that disguises the human na