TAG: Social Design

On the Origins of Avatars

As I sit looking at Tweetdeck this morning, scanning over 40 avatars of people I know and don’t know, I wonder how much of my interaction is influenced by what a particular avatar looks like. Am I more willing to converse with someone who has a realistic avatar? A smiling avatar? Does the offbeat, non-human, text-based avatar inspire better communication or worse?

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The Most Important Feature of a Multi-Device Web: Syncing

If you sync seamlessly across devices, people will love you for it.

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Looking for examples of microcopy

I’ve set up a new Flickr group with the express intent of aggregating examples of microcopy, that tiny copy (often shorter than a sentence) that helps clarify, explain, reduce commitment, or otherwise assuage someone performing (or considering) a task. You can find the group here:

Flickr: Microcopy

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Is Twitter Successful?

The big question everyone has with Twitter is, and the very first one that John Battelle asked Twitter CEO Ev Williams when he interviewed him yesterday, is “What’s the revenue model?”

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Communicating Value through Cause & Effect on Fanfeedr

How Fanfeedr’s intro page does well to communicate the value of the service.

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Feature Development in Action: Broadcast Stream Messages in Socialcast

One of the guiding principles of interaction design is to support existing behavior. This means to figure out what is already happening, what activities, tasks, and interactions people are already doing, and build support for them into software.

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Using your Sign-up form as a Qualifier

I recently ran across an interesting way to qualify people using sign-up forms at monotask.com.

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No Sign-up Necessary (the strikethrough method)

Two apps, Posterous and SignApp, have a novel way to communicate how easy it is to start using their product. I call it the strikethrough method.

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Coming Soon: Make them Care! (my new book)

Just a quick update on my latest project. I’m self-publishing a new book about creating great sign-up experiences. It’s called Make them Care!. (you can get reminded when it’s published here)

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Designing for Social Traction (slide deck)

Here is the slide deck from a talk I gave last week at Delve, a two-day masterclass held in Brooklyn, NY.

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