Workshops

03 Sep	Managing Community, by Design	Lane Becker,Thor Muller &Leslie Chicoine
03 Sep	Wireframing Web 2.0 for Design and Definition	Richard Rutter & James Box
04 Sep	Scaling your Design with your Community	Daniel Burka &Mark Trammell
04 Sep	Social Design: from Strategy to Interface	Joshua Porter

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Managing Community, by Design

If there’s one thing we’ve learned from the rise of the social Web, it’s that all sites have communities whether they realize it or not. Sites that do realize this, however, tend to do a whole lot better than sites that don’t. The success (or failure) of your site has everything to do with how and why the community around it forms.

Fortunately, we’ve learned a lot about the mechanics of how and why community happens, which go well beyond just the interaction and visual design of your site. In this workshop, Leslie, Lane, and Thor, who have years of experience at the intersection of user experience, design, and community, will walk you through examples and exercises designed to answer the questions you need to ask about organizational goals, community management style, internal team structure, and the design choices you need to make in order to bring all those together.

Some of what we’ll cover will include:

• Mapping community design to organizational vision
• Different types of online communities, and which one is right for your organization
• How interaction and visual design affect community expectation and behavior
• Structuring your design and community teams
• Using design to deal with trolls, griefers, and other permanently unhappy individuals
• Connecting your community to the rest of the Web

Led by: Lane Becker,Thor Muller and Leslie Chicoine

Wireframing Web 2.0 for Design and Definition

Modern websites and applications are demanding richer, more nuanced forms of interaction, content and engagement. These pose new challenges for today’s designer. Wireframes are evolving into the ideal tool for defining, designing and documenting these challenges, and this workshop will show you how.

Perfect for user experience designers, information architects, visual designers, front-end coders or producers, we’ll cover the following topics:

• Success criteria
• Planning and research
• The joy of paper
• The wireframe as a website
• The wireframe as documentation
• The wireframes as part of a process
• Using and abusing patterns, libraries & frameworks
• Designing for user-generated content
• Designing and documenting:
  • Ajax
  • Complex interactions
  • Page states - newbies, members and admins
• Energising annotations
• Usability testing
• Presenting wireframes (and sneak a peek at ours)

Throughout the workshop we’ll be designing a set of wireframes for the latest and greatest social network. It’ll be fun and by the end of the workshop you will have learned how to use wireframes a design aid, a documentation methodology and a usability tool. You will have gathered best practices for using wireframes in your process, best bets for efficient use of wireframes and a whole host of design tips along the way.

Led by: Richard Rutter and James Box

Scaling your Design with your Community

Scaling is of particular importance in social sites where your community can grow (and contract) rapidly. As your site expands, you’re going to face many issues you might not have encountered before. Your design will need to handle increased content input by users; to adjust to demands of an ever-growing and demanding user-base; and to technically manage site performance. Daniel and Mark each have experience developing sites that have successfully scaled over time and will be able to knowledgeably discuss handling massive community input, adapting your design over time, using technical tricks to increase performance, and enabling both new and existing users to participate as communities evolve.

This workshop aims to cover the following discussion points

• Technical performance tips (sprites, css management, coding standards, etc)
• Developing levels of participation on your site... advanced users vs novices
• Issues of negative and positive participation (particularly how this evolves as sites scale)
• Adapting for increasing levels of input. (Digg’s story submission process used to have 100 stories per day, now 16,000)
• Handling feedback from your users (particularly how this evolves as sites scale)
• Avoiding feature-bloat in your design.

Led by: Daniel Burka and Mark Trammell

Social Design: from Strategy to Interface

Have you decided to leverage the social interaction of your audience to provide more and better value but aren’t sure where to start or how to move forward? In this workshop, Joshua Porter will show you how to outline a social design strategy and then translate that strategy directly into design.

This hands-on workshop will be organized around several exercises:

• Mapping out a social design strategy
• Identifying Core Activities, Objects, and Product Features
• Creating Interfaces/prioritizing calls to action
• Leveraging social principles in design

During the workshop teams will create actual screen designs from scratch. Even if you’re not an interface designer, this workshop will help you get your team on the same page with the same priorities.

During the day, Josh will share stories from Facebook, Digg, Amazon and others, showing how their interfaces have evolved over time according to lessons they’ve learned. He’ll help you avoid the mistakes that have plagued the early innovators in social design. He'll also describe core psychological research studies that can help point the way toward better social design.

After attending this workshop, you’ll be able to articulate a social design strategy and then design interfaces that directly support it.

Led by: Joshua Porter