Designing for the Social Web (Voices That Matter) | Joshua Porter

Designing for the Social Web (Voices That Matter) | Joshua Porter | A must-read for anyone who designs websites professionalliy

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Designing for the ...

	Designing for the Social Web (Voices That Matter) Joshua Porter New Riders Press, 2008 - 192 pages average customer review:based on 12 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

No matter what type of web site or application you?re building, social interaction among the people who use it will be key to its success. They will talk about it, invite their friends, complain, sing its high praises, and dissect it in countless ways. With the right design strategy you can use this social interaction to get people signing up, coming back regularly, and bringing others into the fold. With tons of examples from real-world interfaces and a touch of the underlying social psychology theory, Joshua Porter shows you how to design your next great social web application.

Inside, you?ll discover:
? The real reasons why people participate online and the psychology behind them
? The Usage Lifecycle?or how people use your web application over time
? How to get people past that trickiest of hurdles: sign-up
? What to do when you?ve launched a web application and nobody is using it
? How to analyze the effectiveness of your application screens and flows
? How to grow your social web application from zero users to 1000?and beyond

Designing for the social web is about much more than adding features. It?s about embracing the social interaction of the people who make you successful?and then designing smartly to encourage it.

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Great Resource for Those Defining the User Experience for Social Web Sites

This book teaches you how to think about designing web interfaces for social websites or websites with social features. You will learn a bit about the psychology behind what works well, so you can incorporate the knowledge into your own design.

The book explains how to prioritize features from the initial sign-up through active user participation on the social website. Many industry examples are given along with some of the reasons why each is successful or not.

The book is about designing the user interface and the overall web site experience. It can and should be read by all team members on the web project including: graphic designers, information architects and developers.

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A must-read for anyone who designs websites professionalliy

Not all websites have a social focus, but all websites can benefit by becoming more social. Joshua Porter explains how to build features and flows that focus on getting users from "unaware" to "passionate user" status through well-designed and thoughtful design. The book is packed with practical tips and ideas for getting the most out of your site. Highly recommended!

A very good reference for people needing to get their sites caught up with the social web

Joshua Porter pours his knowledge about user interface design in social media in this title. While the AOF method (Activities, Objects and Features) he presents early in the book gets a bit confusing when you first read about it, very quickly you get his point.

The design framework he presents is aimed at taking new users of a social site through the steps that make up the usage lifecycle: not being aware of the site > becoming interested in it > using the site for the first time > becoming a regular user > becoming a passionate user.

I see a practical application of Joshua's design philosophy in the way Ning.com (a platform for you to create your own social network) is put together: it is easy for a new member to sign up and create/manage a profile page, interact with other members and sharing with others inside or outside the network so as to make more people aware of the network.

The main downside I found to the book was that, in an attempt to be more comprehensive, it went into certain topics that had little to do with design, such as the case with the chapter on "Authentic Conversations" (why they are the most important thing you can do for your social web site) and the closing chapter on "Funnel Analysis" which seemed a bit rushed and disconnected from the rest. Still, the chapter on authentic conversations was useful and even the one on metrics carried weight and useful tips, just not as much as the rest of the book.

Overall, a very good reference for folks needing to catch up with the social web in the sites they manage.

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A new light about web 2.0

This book is a new light about web 2.0 because shows how the Web 2.0 is, actually, the social web. If you think about web 2.0 as social web, a lot of new ideas and insight are possible, and surpase the "problem" of the suposed versions (2.0, 3.0, 2.5?) Is not 2.0: is the social web!

A very uneven book

The book is a fast read. It's written in a conversational style, which means it's sometimes very verbose but rarely difficult to understand. There are some references, most of them to blog posts or web sites. A lot of the information sounds more like opinions and the background info is not really explained. The writer makes many unnecessary comments and opinions on things that are very loosely related to the treated subject.

The scope of the book is large. This means that the treatment of topics is shallow. Inside one chapter I could find very interesting paragraphs and then a couple of pages of uninteresting (too shallow or repetition of something that was self evident or repetition) musings. The book would have benefited from more editing and condensation of ideas, as it seems the writer would have had more to say on many topics. This is why it's a shame that the expression is not more condensed and organized.

I would recommend the book as an introduction to many issues concerning modern web site design from a non-technical perspective. I didn't find many new things in the book, but found some inspiring thoughts or comments on existing sites. The problem was that due to the unevenness, there was no fast way of recognizing the less interesting material. But, it's a fast & easy read, so not too much time is lost on the boring parts. I felt i got some ideas & inspiration from it which is always nice.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3

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