xviii Preface
Who Should Read This Book
Anyone involved in building social interactions will be interested in this book.
User experience and interaction designers will find the detailed interaction patterns use-
ful in their arsenal of tools. The explanations in the patterns and the related principles will
provide the designer with a full spectrum of details to consider when making decisions
for designing the social experience. The patterns don’t always prescribe how to design the
thing, but they will offer up all the things the designer needs to think about when design-
ing, as well as what trade-offs may need to be made to design a great experience given a
specific business and audience context.
Although this book does not go into technical details for how to build these interfaces, the
web developer will appreciate the patterns, as they can be mapped to specific code solu-
tions and provide the “why” behind design decisions.
Everyone on the product team will benefit from this book, as it provides a common vo-
cabulary around social interactions and offers rich explanations and real-world examples
that can benefit team discussions and communication.
Using the Interaction Patterns
You can read this book cover to cover. It’s arranged with a narrative flow in which ideas
build on one another. But we designed it to work just as well as a reference. You can zero in
on a particular section of interest or just read about a specific interface pattern, exploring
related concepts through cross-references and the index.
This book is here to help you get your job done. In general, you may use the patterns in
this book in your programs and documentation. Not all patterns should be used for every
application; different ideas and social objects will require different solutions. Ideally, you
will sample from each of the categories and will add more complex features and concepts
as the community grows and as you learn what is successful and useful for its needs.
We believe that the entire collection gives context to the social landscape and provides
information about what types of things you should consider as you are making design
decisions.
You do not need to contact us for permission unless you’re reproducing a significant por-
tion of the text of the patterns. For example, creating a pattern repository that uses sev-
eral patterns or excerpts of patterns from this book does not require permission. Selling
or distributing a CD-ROM of examples from O’Reilly books does require permission.
Answering a question by citing this book and quoting the patterns does not require per-
mission. Incorporating a significant amount of pattern material from this book into your
product’s documentation does require permission.
We appreciate, but do not require, attribution. An attribution usually includes the title, au-
thor, publisher, and ISBN, for example, “Designing Social Interfaces, by Christian Crumlish
and Erin Malone. Copyright 2009 Yahoo!, Inc., 978-0-596-15492-9.”