When design kills the content, or how to find a good social media designer
Made by Many is the first company that I’ve worked at that is solely focused on social media. This has come with its own opportunities and challenges, not least of which is knowing how to successfully design for sites that are built around user generated content and not brochure-ware or dynamic information.
This particularly came home on a recent project when we started researching our client’s competition: review and recommendation sites. One of the most interesting parts of this process was noticing how everyone is broadly dealing with the same information, yet with varying degrees of success.
A user comment can be considered the atomic unit of a social review site - it allows people to share their own experience of a place (or purchase). It’s a part of the site that works hard, and the designer has to work hard too. For example, the user can be presented as a name, or a name and avatar image. This could be surrounded by profile details that give other users context. For example, this user has done 15 reviews and is therefore a busy member of the community. Or even some form of dynamic icon that shows how closely the reviewer matches the user’s own personality. Read the rest of this entry
