Although many people are designing mobile products that are social in nature, few understand what that really means, how it works, or why it's important.
In this series for Creative Bloq, Chris Bank of UXPin (opens in new tab), the UX design app, discusses the importance of social design patterns and details examples from some of the hottest websites and web apps today.
You can see previous posts from UXPin here (opens in new tab). Meanwhile, for more examples of web design patterns (opens in new tab), download UXPin's free e-book, Web UI Design Patterns 2014 (opens in new tab) and their free Web UI kit (opens in new tab).
The problem
The user wants to endorse and share content they like.
The solution
Let users participate in content curation by designing a voting system, where content they like can be promoted.
The idea of crowd-sourced content curation was popularized by the likes of Digg and Reddit, and today we see almost every app that has user generated content integrate this pattern to bring up the best from the rest.
On Reddit, Stackoverflow and Quora, users can vote on content created by other users. Not only does this create a history of what the user has upvoted or downvoted (see History pattern), it also gives users a way of popularizing content and like on Medium, publicly associate themselves with something they enjoyed.
Words: Chris Bank (opens in new tab)
Chris Bank (opens in new tab) is the growth lead at UXPin (opens in new tab), a UX design app that creates responsive interactive wireframes and prototypes.
