If you would have observed children closely, you might have noticed that they like tiny spaces, little inlets, and small entrances. These cave like or box like structures entice children much more than open spaces and designing these structures in play areas, game shop lobbies is a proven tactic that is likeable by children. Every pattern explores design ideas that fulfil requirements of those who will be using them and it doesn’t really needs a genius to apply these architectural principals to information architecture. This becomes all the more important if the website that you intent to design is for fulfilling social needs like social news dissemination or social networking of target audiences.

It is not just about children, all of us may behave in different ways when brought together. The consistency of behavior which is exhibited in an informational space which has singularity completely changes when there are individuals collaborating, communicating and engaging in a positive or a negative manner. Indeed, wisdom of crowds and madness of crowds, both are proven concepts and what better place to see it getting displayed in real time one like sites dig.com and delicious.com.

While your designs cannot control people, you can definitely use them to encourage a particular behavior. Science has proven that a person’s behavior is a function of her own self and the environment. Fostering an environment that helps you in encouraging the behavior that you want users to exhibit on your social networking site is important. Emphasize on the points below for social networking website design

Users’ Identity

Identity is a fundamental part of social architecture so give each user an identity, but do not force it upon her. Allow them to customize it as they see fit. The identity paves way for users to express their personality, liking, disliking and repute. More participation enhances the reputation and typically the most social users feature prominently which adds to their repute on the site.

All the elements of the identity have to be though of carefully before programming a social network. A site like Orkut or Facebook will have user profiles which display different fields as compared to a site like Pipl.com or linkedin.com.

Also, users should be able to express themselves and populate the online space. This presence can be a status, mood, activity or a location where the user is currently. The third element is reputation which is a sum of all the “good” and the “bad” deeds and actions the user has taken. The backend and the software should build this reputation tracking into the network since depending on users memory is something that cannot and should not be done.

Users’ Relationships

Humans are complex beings and when there are millions of them, complexity is going to nothing but increase. Creating ways for people using which they can identify the right people and can connect with them is important. But this doesn’t ends here, classification of relationships is important too. Categorization of communities should be around the community itself. Communities can be as straightforward as mutual broadcast networks like twitter or as complex as something like flickr.com. Offering more options for classification may create unnecessary complexity as flickr users have been seemed to be classifying family as friends and friends as contacts.

Social networking websites should give users a way to classify their contacts and add tags like, “we haven’t had a chance to even speak in lat 2 years”! Groups are another relationship structures based around shared interests or common experiences. Also, every social network should have some laid guidelines or norms and any behavior which lurches from these laid norms should result in a ban or time out.

Users’ Activity

If there is nothing more to do than just finding and adding friends, the site will receive no affection or traffic. Community activity is what propels a site ahead. These activities should be targeted for individual participation and should be excelled by participation. The more activities users can do on your social networking site, the more time and energy they will be spending on your site. Sharing is one such element of activity which creates reciprocity. It has a binding effect and gathers people of like interests and allows exchange of ideas.

Conversation is another facet of activity and building software should focus on building relationships around communication and conversation. People should be able to out their words and if they aren’t able to, they will just remain spectators.

Collaboration is another feature of activity which adds the business dimension and team features to the social software. There are tasks and there are users. These tasks will be broken down into smaller chunks and users in their teams will be focusing on getting them accomplished.

People are different and their profiles are their homes. Where to place this home is important too. Some like to live near the busiest square where all activity is happening and some want to walk off to the secluded corner of the town where silence is the keyword. This level of exposure determines what home you want to give to the users. Better is to equally distribute them and let users choose their home.

If we remember the social in social architecture and social networking, we can make sure that new social products actually have the impact that we want to deliver.