Design Patterns for Social Experience

Yes...I know...it has been a long time since I have posted anything in this space. Let me just start out saying that I have been really busy! I am still the sole intranet resource for my company (of 4500 employees) and I am doing the job of 2 or 3.

That being said, I have been working on revamping our "People Finder" application and finally adding some more social features such as two way connections, status updates, and activity feeds.

I have been doing quite a bit of research and found this really great article on Human 2.0 titled Design Patterns for Social Experience.

This really spoke to me:

...social experience design is about the interaction between people rather than the interface between the human and the computer – and that while you can fairly well control one person’s experience with a system, you cannot predict or control how people will choose to interact with each other.

As such, when you design a social experience, all you can really do is provide a framework. You can set the basic rules and capabilities, but the participants will finish the design for you.

Even though this article is about as old as my last post, I think it is worth a read for any intranet manager working on social projects.

Building a better "Employee Chooser"

I have been faced with a UI design problem on our Performance Management system that I am currently building.



There is one area within the site where leaders have the ability to choose another employee within the company to request feedback for one of their direct report's performance review. This is simple stuff, except the UI bit for picking what employee to send the request to.



I have written a couple other apps in the past that needed to do this type of work, but I really did not like the solutions I came up with, namely some type of a drop down list or select list with all the names listed. Problem is, with over 4k employees...this is a really long list.



I like the idea of a type-ahead search box that could show the name, title and photo of a group of employees based on the search string entered. Something like Google's Enterprise Labs "Search as you Type" plug-in for the Google Search Appliance.


So what other ideas do you all have? Please leave me a comment!