Comments on: Onboarding: A Sidebar in “Designing Social Interfaces”

By: heatherjfox

heatherjfox — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 16:30:25 +0000

Whitney–enjoyed your post and liked how you used the metaphor of “onboarding” as a way to envision “guest management” within a website visit (or any digital experience). To take the metaphor to its conclusion, what would the “exit interview” look like?

By: tonybuy

tonybuy — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 06:20:35 +0000

China Supplier offer high quality of the Girls Skirt and other Children Garments.
http://www.childrengarment.com/girlsskirt1.html

By: Pleasure and Pain » So you wanna be a user experience designer — Step 2: Guiding Principles

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 17:21:29 +0000

[...] meet them, you want to set clear expectations about what you can and can’t offer, you want to ease them into the process, you want to be attractive and appealing and strong and sensible. Ultimately you want to ensure [...]

By: Whitney Hess

Whitney Hess — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 12:35:42 +0000

Thanks so much!

By: Whitney Hess

Whitney Hess — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 12:35:29 +0000

Thanks so much for your comment and thoughtful addition.

By: erinmalone

erinmalone — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 18:38:26 +0000

Kevin - sorry the page looks so bad in IE8. We threw together a page with CSS for the main page and then used Mediawiki - pretty much straight outta the box for the Patterns wiki.

I have shifted the homepage to wordpress and a decent wordpress theme and we are working with a designer to come up with a cohesive, well designed system for the site, the blog and the wiki.

Since we are both working primarily as Interaction Designers, and are busy with work and speaking and other things related to the book, we had to reach outside for help and it's still in progress.

Keep checking back though - I want to make sure we work well in IE as much as Firefox and Safari.

And thanks Whitney for the thoughtful essay to go with our patterns on this topic. Helps give the ID patterns shape and context.

By: Kevin

Kevin — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 13:48:25 +0000

Great info! This was really helpful.

I don't want to detract from the post in any way, but the product site:

http://designingsocialinterfaces.com/

Looks like garbage in IE8. Certainly not your fault Whitney, but suprises me considering it's a design book.

I'd include a picture but I'm nost sure how.

Thanks for the post Whitney!

By: prateekdubey

prateekdubey — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 08:47:01 +0000

Great post Whitney! Especially the part about inline help.
Have been looking around for something similar. I do have something to add, here's my two bits:

We faced these first-user problem when designing our project management tool (remindo.com). What we learnt from user studies is that some people in their eagerness skip the first help states and later get lost. So we included something close to a panic button in the design - to be hit when a user feels lost. It links to our customer support and faq's etc. Now we get a steady stream of these queries and it helps us improve the user experience

By: Posts about Business Web Sites as of October 6, 2009 - Perry Multimedia Blog

Posts about Business Web Sites as of October 6, 2009 - Perry Multimedia Blog — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 23:52:29 +0000

[...] if that was your first thought, then I’m afraid you may have to wait a little while longer. Onboarding: A Sidebar in “Designing Social Interfaces” – whitneyhess.com 10/06/2009 Last May I was given the great privilege to write a sidebar in [...]

By: kricharddouglas

kricharddouglas — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 19:12:51 +0000

Whitney,
Great information. When you consider that you only have seconds to influence your new site visitor, it is crucial to take a 'scientific approach' to designing your homepage. Understanding concepts like onboarding and applying that knowledge is the difference between a successful site and one that just languishes.