Creating an engaging user interface—one that encourages site visitors to interact—is at the core of Internet and ecommerce success. Applied correctly, there are known best practices and principles that generally foster online interaction and connection.

These motivational principles can be described as design patterns, which represent the standard means by which site visitors interact for some purpose—site registration or product reviews, for example.

Design patterns are not some kind of ridged frame meant to constrain creativity, but rather a guideline that should speed design and ensure a consistent user experience.

An Excellent Resource for User Interface Design

In their book, Designing Social Interfaces, authors Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone, have collected dozens of the most established and useful design patterns for engaging users.

While you could read this text cover-to-cover as a narrative, it is, in my opinion, best used as a reference, placed near at hand and consulted often as you work through projects. In fact, as a reference text, I believe there are very few books that provide better information about creating usable and engaging interfaces.

The Anatomy of a Design Pattern

In Designing Social Interfaces, each design pattern is organized for rapid comprehension. There are always large images, concise examples, and clear headings that make comprehending the pattern almost obvious.

Take the specific example of recommendations—a feature that many ecommerce sites offer. In the Recommendations design pattern on page 340 of the book, Crumlish and Malone include six short sections, which are consistent across all of the patterns in the text. These sections are “What,” “Use when,” “How,” “Why,” “Related patterns,” and “As seen on.”

The “What” section of the Recommendations pattern includes a simple one-sentence introduction and a clear image of a recommendation content slider from Amazon.com.

The “Use when” section suggests to “offer recommendations when you have a sufficient body of data about your user’s self-declared and implied interests as well as a rich enough social graph to be able to identify similarities and make helpful guesses about likely interesting content,” and includes two more graphics examples.

The “How” section recommends that developers and site managers:

• “Offer a call to action inviting the user to explore recommendations,
• "Educate the user about how to obtain better recommendations (for example by rating content),” and
• “Display recommendations as a list, or if there is a large number, in a carousel or scrollable window.”

The “Why” section provides context: “Recommendations push objects toward people rather than relying on them to be passively discovered. If you can provide value to your users by making educated guesses about the type of objects they are interested in, then you may be able to capture their loyalty. The benefit to users is more readily finding the information and media they need without having to hunt around for it quite so hard.”

The “Related patterns” and “As seen on” sections offer more or similar examples of the pattern.

Summing Up

Design patterns are an often discussed and often dissected topic in user interface circles, so that it is a bold move for Crumlish and Malone to publish a nearly exhaustive collecting of social interface patterns. But it is also a bold move that has paid off. The book is an excellent resource.