UI design pattern tips: friend lists

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 endorse and share content they like.

The solution

Let users participate in content curation by designing a voting system, where content they like can be promoted.

The idea of crowd-sourced content curation was popularized by the likes of Digg and Reddit, and today we see almost every app that has user generated content integrate this pattern to bring up the best from the rest.

On Reddit, Stackoverflow and Quora, users can vote on content created by other users. Not only does this create a history of what the user has upvoted or downvoted (see History pattern), it also gives users a way of popularizing content and like on Medium, publicly associate themselves with something they enjoyed.

Words: Chris Bank

Chris Bank is the growth lead at UXPin, a UX design app that creates responsive interactive wireframes and prototypes.