UX Week 2007 | The Psychology of Social Design

Adaptive Path Podcast

With the rise of YouTube, Craigslist and MySpace, there is a clear trend toward social design, or designing for the social lives of users. What isn’t so clear is how to design for different social situations that may not have appeared on the web before.
To help you attack this problem, we’ll look not only at current good and poor examples of social design, but also mine social psychology to get a larger view of how to design for the social lives of users. After all, humans are social animals. Software should be social, too.
In this session, you will:
* Learn the advantages of investing in social features.
* Discover how to expand current user-research strategies and apply social psychology to enhance the social design aspects of your next project.
* Explore new ways to get people to participate in your social-design-enhanced application.
About Josh Porter
Joshua is a leading member of UIE’s research team and has written extensively on such topics as Web 2.0, Ajax, web standards, and on-site search systems. Josh shares many of his design thoughts and commentaries on his personal blog: Bokardo.com.
Josh is responsible for overseeing the development of the User Interface Engineering’s web sites, managing UIE’s top notch team of web developers.
Josh received his Master’s degree in Information Technology and his Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He brings with him extensive experience and knowledge in the areas of human factors, usability testing, and web site design and development.