IXDA Conference in Toronto: How to Design Social Experiences by Paul Adams

My notes from IXDA Conference in Toronto: How to Design Social Experiences by Paul Adams

With Social experience yo bring along your friends, interests and friend”s interests. We are building systems. Facebook is not a website, it’s a system. The amount of information being published is increasing exponentially. To filter this sea of information. People are turning to their friends.

Social Design

Framework: Identity (Me), Group (Us) and Connections (Everyone)
Me: Help people tell the story of their lives.
Us: Help people build relationships with people they know.
Everyone: Help people connect with new people.

Build relationships with many lightweight interactions overtime.Feeling not facts. (the most commonly shared item). People don’t share facts, they share feelings. (i.e. the before and after photos graphics of Japan tsunami)

Design Tips

1. Explicitly design for personal identity or social identity (focus on one).
Personal Identity: A product that helps new parents catalog and share the first year of their babies life
Social Identity: A product that helps new parents connect with and get advice other new parents
2. Show people things they have in common with each other.
3. Design lightweight ways for people to interact. (i.e. comment and like button)
Lays Facebook campaign (I’d eat that!)
http://allfacebook.com/lays-crowdsourcing-chips_b95110
4. Design for feelings, not facts. (Generated feelings (i.e. Lays chips)
5. Give suggestions for who to communicate with.
6. Design the feed story first.
7. Design the friend’s experience (don’t focus on just the user, but beyond the customer. We are not isolated as one person)

Design Process

1. Build a hypothesis based on social science research (you don’t have to do research anymore)
2. Build a simple product
3. Launch it, real identity, real friends
4. Measure. iterate. Analytics, primary and research.
5. Push code daily/weekly (@ Facebook they push code twice a day)