November 5th, 2007

Google’s Social Design Best Practices

by Joshua Porter  |   8 Comments  |  shortlink: http://bokardo.com/p/702

Tucked away as part of the new Open Social initiative launched last week, Google engineers offered an interesting best practices document of social design dos and don’ts.

Social Design Best Practices

The list of best practices are as follows:

  1. Engage Quickly – (my interpretation: provide value within 30 seconds)
  2. Mimic Look and Feel – (make your widget look like the page it is in)
  3. Enable Self Expression – (let people personalize their widgets)
  4. Make it Dynamic – (keep showing new stuff)
  5. Expose Friend Activity – (show what friends are doing)
  6. Browse the Graph – (let people explore their friends and friends of friends)
  7. Drive Communication – (provide commenting features)
  8. Build Communities – (expose different axes of similarity)
  9. Solve Real World Tasks – (leverage people’s social connections to solve real problems)

This list is interesting for several reasons.

One is that we’re clearly seeing a set of practices emerge across all social software that centers around getting people started quickly, allowing for self-expression, engaged in real-life tasks, yet also allowing for flexible discovery and play. On both this site and others concerned with social design, these are the major themes that arise again and again.

Another is how quickly the social networks have changed the way we look at software in just a couple years. The third item on the list “Enable Self-Expression”, for example, would never have existed before the rise of MySpace. Facebook probably had a lot to do with “Expose Friend Activity”, which is a not-so-subtle reference to the news feed feature on that site.

Finally, I’m struck by how only two or three of the best practices are necessarily part of “social networking” software. They could be used in any kind of social software, be it productivity software for groups or even e-commerce sites that help people find the right product. That, to me, is the essence of social design. It isn’t relegated to social networking, even though the rise of social networking is what helped to clarify and refine the ideas. It’s about building software that takes advantage of social connections to provide enhanced value.

Also, note that these best practices are concerned with this particular technology. The Open Social initiative is a set of programming APIs that allows anybody to embed widgets (gadgets) within web pages (called containers). The embedded widgets can access outside services like MySpace, Orkut, and other social networks. As an simple example, I might embed a widget in my blog that shows my MySpace friends and whether or not they’re online at the moment.

Interesting bits aside, I think that the Google folks did a good job of summarizing some major issues in social design.

Check out my latest project: Make them Care!, a book on designing great sign-up experiences. Get reminded when it's published.

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Comments

1.  Jason Schklar 2:45pm, Mon 5th, 2007

Agreed with the list, especially the initial experience part (#1: Engage Quickly).

Something obvious (and important) that’s missing: Safety. Privacy is an important concern for folks — from embarrassment (my friends see that I’ve shopped at a “ladies shoes” site) and from criminal activity (my identity gets stolen).

2.  Larry Becker 11:03pm, Mon 5th, 2007

Thanks for drawing attention to this list, Josh. I like your observation about several of these recommendations not being limited to social media in scope or relevance. It does seem that social networking’s bringing design to the foreground helps improve user experience in multiple ways.
Any time there’s a big wave of something new, fundamentals get restated (like #1 Engage Quickly). Also, it may be the “Network” in Social Network that appeals first and most to many marketers /e-commerce folks, but it also necessarily reminds that oh yeah it’s real live people in the network who need to be able to easily use not just my newest widget but even my site’s more humble features like nav, search and Cart.

3.  Richard Morton 10:33am, Tue 6th, 2007

I would agree with this list, although I might add “don’t make me think” even though it arguably fits within “engage quickly” anyway.

4.  Nicholas Grobler 5:49am, Mon 12th, 2007

Hello Joshua

This is goos stuff, but still complex. I live in South Africa where 99% of people are mostly ignorant of all things web related. Should social design not push and push and push toward complete and utter simplicity? You and I are power users, we have little respect for the fact that most of earths population do not have a clue what a widget is, let alone create a blog to add it to… The above post does tend toward creating a simplistic model, but still not enough. We are creating a project that aims to get the web to the ground, in a simple, simple way, the biggest thing I have realized, “It is hard” :) Thanks for sharing!

5.  David 1:15pm, Fri 16th, 2007

I think anyone with a good perspective takes these bullet points into account almost sub-conscientiously when developing a social network oriented site. A good list of points though, digging out what some people might not realise, conscientiously or not!

6.  çµå©šæƒ…報サービス 10:55am, Mon 5th, 2008

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