Design Details

323: Designing Social Proof

Episode Summary

In this week's episode we dive into the murky waters of designing social proof in social networks. From upvotes to view counts, reputation to badges, there are a wide array of tools and patterns at a designer's disposal to communicate quality and popularity. But these patterns each have their own drawbacks, tradeoffs, and vectors for abuse. We dig into these, and more. Plus, as always, we share our cool finds for the week, this time featuring a Figma plugin and a beautiful indie video game.

Episode Notes

In this week's episode we dive into the murky waters of designing social proof in social networks. From upvotes to view counts, reputation to badges, there are a wide array of tools and patterns at a designer's disposal to communicate quality and popularity. But these patterns each have their own drawbacks, tradeoffs, and vectors for abuse. We dig into these, and more. Plus, as always, we share our cool finds for the week, this time featuring a Figma plugin and a beautiful indie video game.


Golden Ratio Patrons:

Sisu is looking for a thoughtful and data-savvy designer to help build the next generation of analytics software. You can find out more at sisu.ai. (You might recognize Sisu from our interview with Michie Cao)

Flywheel is a delightfully designed managed WordPress hosting platform, thoughtfully built for busy creatives. Streamline your workflow with their slick platform and sweet set of workflow tools perfectly made for designers! Get started at getflywheel.com/designdetails


Follow-up:

New supporters! Thank you to everyone who has joined our Patreon this week:

Ya'll also tweeted sweet nothings at us:

Additionally, last week Brian was able to share what he's been working on for the past few months: GitHub for mobile! Rafa and Kevin over at Layout also discussed the app on their most recent episode.


Industry talk:

This week we dive into the murky waters of designing for social proof: the inputs, signifiers, and patterns that help people determine what is "popular" online.


One Cool Thing:


Design Details on the Web:


Aloha!