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.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.

Being able to successfully handle these elements are all part of the job of designing for social media. Knowing what to prioritise, how to shape the information to guide people through the page, knowing what the conventions are, and of course creating something that is both visually great and meets the brand values of the site at the same time.

Unfortunately it’s sometimes difficult to get this mix right. Especially when you start adding in the functionality and information that helps drive social sites:

In this example, the stuff around the review has become more important than the review itself. Thankfully in this case the information in the review isn’t that interesting. It’s easy therefore to say that I’ve deliberately selected a one line review to make my point.

However, what if this review was a great one liner? ‘Great mix of people, young crowd, see the drum and bass nights on Thurs, can get a little crowded.’ In example above this important text would be completely lost in the page and therefore ceases to become valuable.

From a design perspective, no doubt each review would ‘look’ and ‘function’ better if they were a little longer. In fact I bet that in the original Photoshop file the reviews looked just fine. However, this is another key part of social media: designing for every eventuality. The blank slate, the one word review vs the essay. Each instance needs to be as successful as the next…

With our clients, we’re launching several sites over the next few months – all of which deal with these design issues and many more. In the meantime, we’re expanding our team and hiring designers: from talented graduates to experienced senior designers. If you’re interested and know that you can design for social media, drop us a line: jobs [at] madebymany.co.uk.