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, 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. Meanwhile, for more examples of web design patterns, download UXPin's free e-book, Web UI Design Patterns 2014 and their free Web UI kit.
The problem
The user wants to rate content in a simple way without having to worry about the degrees to which they like it.
The solution
Simplify rating controls by making them binary choices - the user either likes it or dislikes it.
Eliminating the fine-grain of stars and rating scores, this makes rating things easier for users as well as interpreting them.
If I enjoyed a video, should I rate it four stars or go all the way with five stars? YouTube and almost every application lets you like (or even dislike) everything in a binary way instead.
A lot of web apps provide a way of showing appreciation by simply 'liking' or 'hearting' content.
Words: Chris Bank
Chris Bank is the growth lead at UXPin, a UX design app that creates responsive interactive wireframes and prototypes.
