Last May I participated at Christian Crumlish’s workshop about the design of social interfaces. The workshop was great, exposing several design principals, and I felt I had to somehow apply that at work in an interactive way. Based on some tips from Christian and on past experience I organized the following session.
The Principles
Christian’s book Designing Social Interfaces is a collection of design principles and patterns.
- Prepare the meeting choosing 1 or 2 of the concepts proposed in the book.
For example, you could use the Pave the Cowpaths and Use Game Mechanics principles. Read carefully about them.
- Prepare a few slides to explain the principles to your colleagues.
Participants
Depending on the principles you want to discuss about, you might like to invite colleagues from your own design team, product managers, programmers or marketing people. Do not underestimate your colleagues, different ideas encourage discussion.
- Invite people from different groups.
The Meeting
- Explain the principles, give examples.
- Make sure you leave on the screen a slide with the principles (so the participants can read them during the exercise.)
You have to ask participants to imagine how to apply those principles on the current website. For example, you could ask to look for those “cowpaths” from current user behavior that could be “paved” to improve the user experience.
- Ask participants to write short ideas on post-its.
- After a few minutes, ask them to tell out loud what they wrote down, to explain a little bit and to paste the post-its on the whiteboard.
You will find that some ideas are similar.
- Group ideas and ask participants to help you name those groups.
Round Up
This kind of meeting might not give you a definite answer to your design problems, but for sure it could help you start playing with new ideas, based on stablished principles.
Even more, these meetings are a lot of fun and trigger discussion and conversation through different departments.
Give it a try!
SIM Card. Picture by 
Google search box.
iPhone Notes application screenshot.
USB Connector. Picture by 
Different shapes for each connector. Picture by 
A padlock. Picture by 
It is easy to see the symbols on buttons, the contrast is good but having several functions working on one button could be confusing. From Rollei, we liked the way it navigates through pictures (unfortunately I can not show you that).
Having less buttons could make the camera look simple, but this graphic interface show us that this is not always true.
Here we noticed that it is very difficult to see the labels on buttons, the contrast is very bad.
One function for each button could be a good approach. I like the knob to turn the camera on and off, it’s impossible to confuse it with the shooting button.
The “Share” button might have good functionality, but honestly I don’t know what it does. What we discovered interviewing elderly people is that this group avoids pressing on buttons they don’t know what they are for.
This one has some buttons on the top that are almost impossible to see while taking pictures. “BS” seems to be something only Casio uses, we don’t know the meaning.
Painted buttons have great contrast! Unfortunately, it is very difficult to see what’s written on the other ones.
It seems that Casio likes wheels. Unfortunately, these wheels do not behave like real wheels.
There are some contrast issues here (on the buttons), but the most impressive things are the wheels. The one on the top is a real wheel the user can turn, the one on the bottom can not be turned.
These two models (above, below) got a touch screen. This is a risky approach, success depends mostly on how well the graphic interface is designed. For the one below, graving it properly could be quite complicated. 
This model got lots of functionality, buttons and wheels!
Flash position is good here, it’s difficult to place the finger on it.
The wheel could be an issue here and the buttons on top of the camera could not be seen when needed.
Some of the buttons in this camera seem to be part of this brand’s lexicon.
Painted buttons look great but the other ones have very bad contrast, I can imagine this being a big issue using the camera outdoors and even more for the elderly.
I wonder if labels like “AF/AE” are understandable to everybody. Should we carry the manual with us?
On many Canon cameras the wheel looks and works like a wheel, main function of it is to navigate through saved pictures. I like it a lot. 
Interesting design, but using buttons that don’t really look like buttons could be dangerous.
This model goes in the right direction. The wheel is great. Unfortunately the graphic interface is not that simple.
We noticed that symbols on this model are difficult to understand for many people, specially the ones on the top wheel.