Artigo da autoria de By Cameron Chapman, July 13th, 2009

1. Social Network Design: Examples and Best Practices
URL: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/07/13/social-network-design-examples-and-best-
practices/
By Cameron Chapman July 13th, 2009 Design 59 Comments Publishing Policy
According to Nielsen Online, social networks and blogs are now the 4th most popular kinds of online activities.
67% of the world online population are now visiting them and the time they’re spending on them is growing by
three times the overall growth rate of the internet. Social networks are now visited more often than
personal email is read. Some social networks have grown to such enormous proportions that they rival entire
countries in terms of population—if Facebook, for example, was a country, it would be the fifth-most-populated
in the world (right between Indonesia and Brazil).
There’s a lot of variety out there in the realm of social network design. Some sites keep a very professional
approach (like LinkedIn) while others have a more organic, free-form look (like MySpace). Most sites fall
somewhere in between, mixing professionalism with personalization (like Facebook). But what’s the best way to
design a social network? What are the elements that make a social network more user-friendly and more
attractive to users? Read on to find out.
Also consider our previous articles:
9 Common Usability Mistakes In Web Design which details how to prevent common usability blunders.
20 (Alternate) Ways to Focus on Users shows ways to get more information about your users’ experience on
your site.
More Web Design Trends For 2009 offers information on some important design trends for this year, many
of which can be applied to social network design.
Clear And Effective Communication In Web Design tells how to make sure you web site communicating
efficiently with your users.
1. Engage Quickly
Engagement is crucial for the success of any website. You need to make sure that visitors are immediately drawn
into your site, either through great content, a compelling call to action, or some other means.
What’s It For?
Users need to know what your site is all about within seconds of reaching your home page. Most people don’t
have time (or inclination) to try to figure out what a website is for if it’s not immediately apparent to them. A
simple tag line, the use of graphics, your site’s title, or any number of other elements on your home page can
serve to provide new visitors with some indication of what your site’s purpose is.

2. Facebook does an excellent job of quickly informing new visitors of their purpose right on their home page.
Give Visitors Something To Do
Your home page should present visitors, both new and returning, with something to do. Logging in or signing up
is the most obvious thing for visitors to do, but think about other options. Give them the opportunity to explore
what the site is all about before they sign up. Let them search for people they already know on the site. Give
them a chance to see why they should sign up before forcing them to. It builds a sense of trust between your site
and its users right from the start.
Xing presents users with multiple actions right on their home page, including signing up, taking a tour, or
exploring content.
Promote Interesting Content From Friends
Show your users what their friends are doing. From the moment someone logs in, they should be able to see
what their friends have been doing, posting, and otherwise promoting. Most sites approach this with a news feed
or similar listing of all the activities your friends are up to.
Library Thing shows books recently added by friends.
Make It Easy To Find Friends
There’s nothing sadder than a social network account with few or no friends. Make it easy for your users to find
friends, both new and old. Letting users search by email, school, company, name, and other identifying factors
makes it more likely they’ll engage with a lot of other users, improving everyone’s user experience. The more
friends a user has, the more active their profile and news feeds will be, meaning they’re more likely to come back
often.

3. Facebook’s “Invite Friends” page uses a format similar to sending an email.
2. Let Users Express Themselves
Self-expression is one of the hallmarks of social media. Some sites approach this by giving users almost full
control over the way their profile page looks (MySpace). Others restrict the design options but let users add
content to suit their own preferences (Facebook). The degree to which your social network allows users to
cusotmize and personalize their profiles is up to you; just make sure there’s some functionality in that area.
Profile Pages Should Promote Personal Expression
Whether you allow full control over user profiles or only limited access to changing their appearances, users
should at least have some ability to make their profile reflect their personality. This can be done through
changing color schemes and backgrounds or adding content.
DeviantART allows artists to customize their profiles by adding different kinds of content modules.
Promoting Individuality In Applications
Letting users show their individuality within applications is also a good idea in social networking design. You can
do this by allowing users to comment on their activities within applications (as Facebook does) or in other ways.
Some applications can be used directly to express a user’s personality. Applications like this include the various
gifting, flair, and survey applications. One of the best examples of an application that lets users express who they
are is the Living Social application (which is kind of a social network within itself), which allows users to create
“top 5″ lists about almost anything.
3. Be Dynamic
Dynamic content is the lifeblood of Web 2.0 sites. Social networks are no different. Content should change
constantly, with the newest, most popular, and most valuable information continually pushed to the forefront for
users.

4. Have Regularly-Changing Content
Because of the nature of social networking sites, there’s new content constantly available from users. Take
advantage of this by including content, both on the home page and on individual users’ profiles or main pages,
comprised of these updates. Updated content keeps users coming back, as there’s more to see each time they
visit.
Experience Project includes featured content on their home page.
Update Content in Real-Time
Utilizing a real-time news feed for your users is a huge convenience. At this point, very few sites are doing this.
Facebook has the closest thing to a real-time news feed I’ve seen. It shows you when there are updates, but still
requires a click to actually view them (and is often buggy when displaying them). The ideal would be an ajax or
similar news feed that updated every minute or so without requiring any user input.
Living Social has a real-time news feed of activity happening across their network.
4. Allow Friends To Be Grouped
As friend numbers grow, the ability to group them becomes more important. When you only have thirty or forty
friends, it’s often not a big deal to just lump them all together. But when your friend numbers grow to 100, 200,
500 or higher, being able to group them together almost becomes a necessity. After all, you might want to keep
your work friends, college friends, casual acquaintances, close friends, and family all in separate groups, both to
filter whose updates you see and how much others see of your updates and other information.
Let Users Define Groups

5. User-defined groups make the most sense when it comes to organizing friends. Some users may only want to
organize their friends into a couple of different groups (such as business and personal or family and friends).
Others might want to set up dozens of groups for their friends. In either case, make sure users can add their
friends to more than one group at a time.
Create Automatic Groups
Automatically grouping friends makes sense, too. Grouping friends by which applications they’re using seems to
be the most popular of this kind. Other options might include friends who are also members of the same groups
or who share common friends.
The Brooklyn Art Project social network groups their members by the type of art they work with.
5. Use OpenSocial
OpenSocial, Google’s application platform for social networks, opens up a range of possibilities for your social
networking site. The primary function of OpenSocial is to allow developers to create applications that can be
used across a wide range of social networks. But OpenSocial has other benefits, too, like letting your users take
their profile information across the range of sites using OpenSocial.
Provide More Applications To Users
Applications have become one of the most important and most-used features of social networks. Everything
from productivity apps to games to gifting apps to apps for expressing yourself are available through OpenSocial.
And developers are adding new applications on a daily basis. Because Google runs it, you also don’t need to
worry about the program closing down anytime soon.

6. Ning is only one of a host of social networks that supports the OpenSocial API.
Let Users Take Their Profiles Anywhere
Allowing your users to take their profile information to other sites implementing OpenSocial is another big
advantage. This, of course, means they can also bring their profile information over to your network, which can
increase the number of new registrations you get.
6. Make It Easy To Communicate
The entire point of a social network is to foster communication. If you make it difficult for users to converse with
each other, your site most definitely will not last for very long. Make sure when you’re planning and developing
your site that you keep communication at the forefront of every decision you make. If it does anything to hinder
your users from talking to each other, drop it.
Provide Multiple Means Of Communication
Most social networks provide multiple means of communication for their users. The basics are private messages,
public wall messages or comments, and live chat or instant messaging. While it’s best to include all three of
these, at a bare minimum your site should provide some way to send public messages and a way to send private
messages.

7. Facebook’s private messaging system is only one way they foster communication among members.
Foster Conversations
Make it easy for users to have conversations with each other. Whether this is done through threaded messages,
commenting, or some other method, you want your users to have effective conversations. Make it easy to pull
additional people into the conversation, too, to make your site even more dynamic.
7. Show Only Relevant Information
Social networks are generally teeming with information. Between friend updates, users’ own activities, and
notices from groups they’re associated with, there’s a constant stream of data coming at your users. Don’t
compound the problem by sending them even more information that they dont’ necessarily need.
What Really Needs To Be Here?
When designing your user interface, ask yourself this question repeatedly. Is it really necessary for a certain bit
of information or an option to be included on a given page? If the answer is no, then don’t include it there. Only
give your users the minimum necessary information to perform the tasks you want them to perform. Just make
sure if there’s additional information some users might want that you make it easy enough for them to find it.
Daily Challenge hides some information until users hover, which leaves their interface decluttered and clean-
looking.
Don’t Overwhelm Your Users
The volume of information on a social network can quickly become overwhelming. Don’t contribute to this
problem by then offering them a dozen different options for each action they might take on your site. Simplify
the information and choices you give them to make their user experience better.
The same principal applies to the volume of information the site itself provides to users. If your site is constantly
sending out updates and news announcements, it can quickly overwhelm users. Only send out notifications when
absolutely necessary. Set up a blog or news page (with an RSS feed) for posting non-essential information. This
way users can see what’s happening on their own terms.
Give Users The Ability To Filter

8. Allowing users to filter out information from some users or groups is another way to improve a user’s experience.
Letting users filter out updates from certain users or applications makes it easier for them to see the information
they want to see without getting overloaded.
Facebook allows users to filter their news feed based on content or user-defined groups.
8. Make It Easy To Take Action
Every social network has certain actions they want users to take. Whether it’s to join more groups, invite more
friends, click on ads or sponsored links, or post more updates, there’s likely a laundry list of desired activities
every site would like to have all of their users perform. The key to getting users to actually take these actions is
to make it both easy and appealing to do so.
Emphasize The Desired Response
Make it obvious which response or action you want users to make. This can be as simple as using larger buttons
for the preferred response and a small text link for the less desirable one, or using different colors or language
for different options. In either case, make the desired response appear to be the more desirable one.
WriterFace makes it very obvious what actions they want users to take.
Make It Easy To Find Things
If you want users to perform certain actions, make it easy for them to find those actions. The most obvious
example is in inviting new friends. Make it straightforward and easy for users to find the form to invite their
friends who might not be members of your network. Organize available actions in a semantic manner so users
can logically find the options they’re looking for.

9. 9. Show Avatar Photos
Virtually every social network out there allows users to upload a profile photo. Display this image near any
activity a user performs. This could be next to their updates in a news stream, in lists of friends, or in the
general site directories.
People Like Seeing Other People
Social network users like to see other social network users. And seeing your friend’s picture next to a particular
application or other element of the site makes it more likely you’ll click on whatever they’re promoting. It builds
a sense of trust to see a face you recognize, even if you’ve never actually met that person in real life.
10. Include Ways For Members To Connect
When social networks first started, most people only friended other people they knew in real life. But as social
networks have grown, they’ve become a way to meet new people. Empower your users to find each other based
on common interests. Provide tools to let people who don’t know each other, and who possibly aren’t even
friends on the network, to communicate and get to know each other.
Include User Groups
Many social networks now allow users to create and join groups based on common interests. Sometimes these
groups are serious (such as professional groups) while other times they’re just for fun. What they all share in
common, though, is that they allow users to find other users who are interested in the same things they are.

10. Eons showcases user groups right on their home page.
Provide A Member Directory
Member directories are another good way to allow your users to find each other. These are particularly useful for
small, niche social networks, as they allow every member to see every other member. In a large social network
they quickly become less valuable unless you also include ways for members to filter the directory (such as by
age or location). In large social networks it’s also a good idea to let members opt out of being included in the
directory (kind of like having an unlisted phone number).
Further Resources
Area for further articles and related resources.
Applications of Usability Principles on a Social Network
Offers useful information on making your social network more user-friendly.
A Collection of Social Networking Stats for 2009
Gives great stats on how social networks are being used worldwide.
Social Design Best Practices
From the OpenSocial wiki.
Social Network Websites: Best Practices from Leading Services
A slideshow covering the practices of a number of leading social networks.

11. Cameron Chapman
Cameron Chapman is a professional Web and graphic designer with over 6 years of
experience. She writes for a number of blogs, including her own, Cameron Chapman On
Writing. She’s also the author of Internet Famous: A Practical Guide to Becoming an Online
Celebrity.
Homepage Twitter Page
Tags: networking, social
59 Comments Best Comments
1
July 13th, 2009 12:36 am
james
first!! nice post too!
-3
Tim July 13th, 2009 12:46 am
Interesting post…. nice and indepth… cheers
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+2
3
July 13th, 2009 12:47 am
Helen
Deviantart:… users should at least have some ability to make their profile reflect their
personality. This can be done through changing color schemes and backgrounds or adding
content.
… or with dangerous malware in the profile! :)
+1
Vasu March 2nd, 2010 6:46 pm
Its good
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-1
Gerd Wippich July 13th, 2009 12:55 am
Very interesting – and timely – article. Thank you, Cameron.
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-1
dapas July 13th, 2009 1:02 am
Yes, it must can be simple and practise…
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-1
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July 13th, 2009 1:04 am
Ricardo Machado
:) Nice post ;) … Although I believe that social networks became too filled up with ʻuseless
informationʼ… For example, in the point 1 – “Promote Interesting Content From Friends” –
I think that warnings about “XPTO has played Dungeons & Dragons… Why donʼt you play
too?” arenʼt valuable.

12. Another example is the ʻHi5′ that became too spammed… I receive, in average, 10
messages per day saying that ʻXPTO wants you in his/her crewʼ … Iʼve changed my original
thougth from “Hey Social Networks are cool!” to “Hey… Social Networks are starting to annoy
me :S”.
But every ʻtwo thousand yearsʼ appears one social network with a reasonable utility (in the
beginning) like Twitter, that can be used to promote ourselves, or LinkedIn for
Professional/Business Social activities :)
-1
Cy July 13th, 2009 1:15 am
Good article! I think another way that facebook got around so fast was the word of mouth
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and indirect advertising. Its like since my friend is got facebook i am going to also get
facebook, and it spreads around like that. Since i have used many social networks myspace,
twitter and facebook. I never liked myspace, i think they have overdone it. The one i stayed
with though was FaceBook, i think its more simpler and easy to use and its designed better.
Another reason i stayed with it was, everyone i know of well almost everyone has it, and
since i got friends all over its so easy to communicate with friends and families. However it
breaks IE sometimes cause of the javascripts, but that is cause of the new versions of IE and
yes its gay!!
Sweet article!
Cheers,
Cy
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9
July 13th, 2009 2:31 am
Radek
Hyves, a Dutch sn-site, checks for notifications nonstop. It uses AJAX everywhere.
Good post!
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10
July 13th, 2009 2:33 am
Dax
footnote: Unlike other social network art sites like Artician, only subscribers are able to
customize Deviantart CSS styles. As for the modules, only a handful are available to non-
subscribers too. For the rest of us thereʼs not much to play around with.
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11
July 13th, 2009 2:36 am
Harish
Again a good post……………..
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12
July 13th, 2009 3:03 am
uygar
good job again. thanks!
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13
July 13th, 2009 3:36 am
jarrod
How does one even start a social network service?
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13. 14
July 13th, 2009 3:57 am
Tejendra Shandilya
gr8
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Stoyan Delev July 13th, 2009 4:16 am
Nice post
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July 13th, 2009 4:30 am
Hastimal Shah
its was a great article.
Thanks :)
0
Dave July 13th, 2009 5:05 am
Damn, thatʼs a lot to digest. Good article.
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0
Vijay Rayapati July 13th, 2009 5:45 am
Excellent read for people involved in building social media related applications.While we are
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already using some of these best practices, we will surely incorporate more best practices
from this list in our GizaPage.com platform – an online identity management platform.
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19
July 13th, 2009 6:57 am
Cosmi
Great article. Thank you SM!
0
Craig Hooper July 13th, 2009 7:36 am
This is retarded—the most obvious information possible. Why not post an article titled “web
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design best practices”, and start w/ this…
01. Use XHTML/CSS.
02. Use a web host.
03. Offer your end-users navigation to move through the product.
04. Donʼt add machine gun sounds.
05. Donʼt save your files w/ a “.exe” extension.
06. Do place content on the pages.
-1
21
July 13th, 2009 8:08 am
iFew
very nice practices
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22
July 13th, 2009 8:22 am
Chris Robinson
Nice list
0
Julianne July 13th, 2009 9:23 am
23

14. Excellent. Chock full of information!!! I will be tweeting this one for sure!
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0
24
July 13th, 2009 9:52 am
Davin
This is retarded—the most obvious information possible. Then do not read it. Yes, for most,
this fairly simple recap of widespread knowledge. As a consolidated source of information the
post has value.
0
25
July 13th, 2009 10:24 am
BenDesign
Nice article.
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26
July 13th, 2009 11:14 am
Justin
Great advice…
But the obvious question to follow these pieces of advice is: how?
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27
July 13th, 2009 12:17 pm
David Ferreira
Great help!
And for Mr. Craig Hooper, if you didnʼt noticied yet, this kind of articles is for people who
need advices and resources, people who need to learn something. Assuming that you are a
GENIUS and you already knew everything in this article, why do you waste your time here?
0
Chris Wren July 13th, 2009 7:17 pm
Justin: OpenSocial is a set of standards and a body of open source code to which Google
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contributes. You, or anyone, can pick up that code and start running with it. Google Friend
Connect is built on OpenSocial and allows you to quickly copy and paste your way to a
social network with a lot of the features on this list. I hope that helps!
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29
July 13th, 2009 7:24 pm
Gomi
I canʼt help but notice that Friendster just fails on most of the pointers :)
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30
July 13th, 2009 7:36 pm
Debashish Paul
Great Post there!!!
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31
July 13th, 2009 8:02 pm
rod
In other words, copy Facebook
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32
July 14th, 2009 5:22 am
Tarek Laarif
Youʼre forgetting Netlog.com!
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15. 0
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July 14th, 2009 5:51 am
Bas de Groot
Nice article! I will use it by my next community project!
Maybe an extra option:
- Support. A good faq and maybe live support.
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July 14th, 2009 12:12 pm
Blogger User
These are not just great tips for designing networks but simply the best tips on working with
every kind of sites, blogs and social customizable accounts.
0
azizbaba July 15th, 2009 12:46 am
Fantastic work. Thenks very much for that article.
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0
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July 15th, 2009 12:50 am
Alexander
Great article and informative, however, I know for a fact that with Deviant Art, granted that it
is a free site, you have to be a paid subscriber in order to use most of those features. ;)
0
Jeremy Swinfen Green July 15th, 2009 1:19 am
Thank you for this excellent and very clear article with its great examples. As well as
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providing a helpful introduction to people who are unfamiliar with social networking, I think it
will also be very useful for people who are knowledgeable about the subject but havenʼt had
time to sit down and structure their knowledge.
0
Aaron Smith July 15th, 2009 2:03 am
Great informative post guys..
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0
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July 15th, 2009 3:22 am
Dave Hale
Social networking is a key “ingredient” to a business. Although it just recently become
popular from the past 5 years or so, it has definitely changed the way business run things
now.
Keep the good info coming.
0
AV4TAr July 15th, 2009 4:42 am
cool well done
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0
Shaweet July 15th, 2009 5:36 am
Good post and all valid points. Someday, someone is going to build the perfect social
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networking tool.. Some people may think Facebook is there but personally, I think it falls

16. short of “killer app” status due to two key reasons….
1) It would be nice to segregate your friends into different groups and thus you would have
different walls for those groups. Itʼs the biggest reason I donʼt use Facebook because I donʼt
want my work colleagues seeing stuff my family writes of read about what I did back in
University. Facebook is the first place I goto when Iʼm hiring someone and Iʼve screened out
people because of racial comments, pictures of them smoking up and other dumb stuff. If
you arenʼt smart enough to keep it off facebook, then you arenʼt smart enough to work in the
job Iʼm hiring you for.
2) You should not have to do 57 different steps to shutdown and remove the content from
your profile should you want to leave a social network. Also, giving full publishing rights of
what is in your profile (pictures, comments, personal information) is not something that should
sit well with people. You donʼt give your government this kind of freedom with your personal
info/work, why do you give it to someone who is even less accountable?
Other than those 2 gripes, Facebook has done a phenomenal job in keeping groups
together, allowing old friends to reconnect (and old flames) and brought grandma/grandpa
into the information age.
0
Alice July 15th, 2009 6:08 am
lol I watch that deviant user… /o/
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I want a css journal also, but I donʼt have money….
0
Nwagi.com July 16th, 2009 1:05 am
social networking website has changed the traffic of user generated content…. it is a
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challenging to make user interface for those kind of services…
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July 16th, 2009 1:41 pm
Joe
Seems kind of obvious & pointless for an article. If anything it should be titled differently,
these are characteristics of a social network, not “best practices”
0
Sunara July 20th, 2009 7:52 am
fantastic post! thanks a lot cz i was looking around for something like this as my next
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assignment topic is on social networking:)
n personally out of all these facebook is the only one i actually stuck through the
years..everything else eventually made me weary.anyway the way i see it is if u have enough
brain and have some sort of control over not accepting every request thatʼs being made,
facebook can certainly make ur life so much more fun.
the only drawback it has is that we have no control over who sees the content that is on our
wall..if there was an option at each post or tag for us to control it(optional kindaff).
and if only this could be overcome facebook possibly canʼt get any better!
0
Seth July 20th, 2009 9:41 pm
Nice post, thanks.
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0

17. Fred July 21st, 2009 3:28 am
Very interesting post Cameron, thanks very much.
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I found allowing grouping of friends together and hover states very interesting and something
that makes a lot of sense.
Cheers again.
0
Kevin Johansen July 24th, 2009 12:42 am
Sadly, this article does not cover the biggest issue with social networks: they dont properly
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support human interaction. They are emotionally dead. Facebook is after all, nothing more
than a directory with the possibility of being a planning tool and a advertising space for one
self or ones company.
How do I have a good time truly WITH others? How can I collaborate with others with the
sense of being together (which has a very large impact on a work process)? No social
network or CSCW application has yet provided functionality to truly copy same-space same-
time interaction.
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August 8th, 2009 11:48 pm
ianjuve
nice article. thanks to share it..
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sandy October 19th, 2009 9:44 am
great information. do you have a directly of examples that we can submit?
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sandy
megastarmedia.com
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Giles Van Gruisen December 2nd, 2009 6:58 am
More awesome articles like this, please! Really useful!
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January 17th, 2010 3:39 am
Nikunj Bhatt
A very nice article. It a good resource to consider when building and choosing a social
networking site (SNS).
From the above comments, Shaweetʼs comment about the privacy of posting messages to a
specific group of people should also be considered when building/choosing an SNS. It means
an SNS should have features of both professional network (LinkedIn, XING etc.) and
entertainment network (Orkut, Hi5, Facebook, Tweeter, MySpace etc.) but messages of these
GROUPs should be availble to their group members only or it should be customizable.
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April 5th, 2010 1:53 am
Viswanath
Hi thats a great post
I came across this website wowzzy.com which is an business networking website
the design is real good for business purposes I think but its only for business owners I
waiting for that website to launch in india too

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June 20th, 2010 8:02 pm
Abhishek Dilliwal
Great!!!! this is really helpful
Thanks :)
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phil July 27th, 2010 7:57 am
this is a really great article. i think the next step is having the right tools to bring your SN to
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life. Do you have any pointers?? Again very informative and compact. Cheers!!
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September 1st, 2010 11:55 am
Andrea The English Webmistress
Killer article. Great for a project Iʼm working on. Thanks!
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January 28th, 2011 3:21 pm
Michelle Poteet
Great info! Relevant and helpful!
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jhoan February 3rd, 2011 1:04 am
hmmm… dai ko lamang masabutan…. da!
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0
nameman April 11th, 2011 9:42 pm
the sudden change of tack
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