Workshop Social by Design

When Facebook Photos launched, there were dozens of photos products on the market. On spec, they were all superior to Facebook Photos: they supported more file formats, they supported much higher resolutions, they gave users many more features to edit their photos. But Facebook Photos had one feature the others did not have: the ability to tag your friends. Facebook Photos was built around social behavior. It was built around the thing we care most about when we take photos - the other people in them. It quickly became the leading online photos product because it was 'social by design'. 'Social by design' is important to designers because the web is being rebuilt around people. The evidence of this fundamental change is all around us. Smart businesses are re-orienting themselves around people, their friends, and their network. In order to do so successfully, they’ll need a deep understanding of how our social lives are structured, what motivates us to interact with others, and how our identity shapes our behavior. Many designers have tried adding social functionality to their existing products. This workshop will explain why this approach of 'bolting-on' social features is unlikely to work. It will explain why successful social products are built around social behavior. It will go through some fundamental design principles, based on decades of research into social behavior, that teach designers how to design products and features that are 'social by design'. We'll do some design exercises to show how these principles apply in practice.

Talk How Our Social Circles Influence What We Do, Where We Go, and How We Decide

When it comes to the things we like, the activities we do, the products we buy and the places we go, we turn to our friends to help us decide. The people around us are our workaround solution to the increasing amount of choice, and the increasing amount of available information, in our world. Smart businesses are re-orienting themselves around people, their friends, and their network. But in order to do so successfully, they’ll need a deep understanding of how our social lives are structured offline as well as online. How we have different relationships with different people. How we act differently depending on our motivation for communication. How we trust some people more than others. In this talk, you will hear stories that illustrate the social patterns in our lives, and how businesses can use that knowledge to build new products, market themselves in more relevant ways, and create experiences that people value. Paul will share stories about how people we are close to, and people we've never met, may or may not influence us, and explain how norms learned from people's local culture impact how much they can be influenced. His goal is for you to walk away with concrete ideas about building great products built around social behavior.