Reading: Designing for the Social Web

First, Happy New Year and Best Wishes for 2009 to all!

As part of my holiday reading, I recently picked up and read Designing for the Social Web by Joshua Porter, and I'd highly recommend it if you're interested in the subject or in designing web sites.

Usually I end up flipping through technical books, trying to capture the headlines and the gist of it, but this book was different - it had me pretty intently reading the material. The key thing was how this book got across the concepts clearly and succinctly along with some great real-world examples to complement. This book certainly shares a lot of insight, and is a fun read at the same time. It certainly made me realize some things and intuitively start comparing the subtle differences in experiences between social sites such as Facebook, or Live, though I am not going into that tangent any further right now :-)

There were a few key topics covered in the book that I'll just touch on here instead.

The first key concept is the notion of the Usage Lifecycle. The stages a user goes through and the hurdles a designer must design for aren't all that surprising, but are often overlooked. This diagram summarizes the concept, and the book is organized around incorporating this lifecycle into the design.

This lifecycle also lends itself to a funnel analysis model described in the book for gathering data and improving one stage at a time, and making that a more scientific and deterministic process. Basically the idea is of all possible users at one stage, only some proceed to the next stage (imagine flowing down the funnel)... and that the funnel is leaky no matter what you do - all you can do is continually improve so more users proceed further through the funnel.

Another interesting concept described in the book is the AOF Method (activities, objects and features) for designing social web applications. Activities define at very high level what the target audience does and in fact could be used to derive social metrics; social objects are what the users work with and the nouns of the site (each gets a URI to facilitate addressability), and features define the functions and verbs of the site.

Social web apps are all the craze these days. Joshua also has a blog that covers social web design topics including the usability lifecycle.

Looking forward, I'm hoping to blog about what I read that I find particularly interesting - lets see if this materializes into an actual trend through the rest of the year.