The Prosocial Design Library
About the Library
The Prosocial Design Library is a pattern library of evidence-based design interventions, which designers may use in their products to improve the quality of their users’ interactions with one another.
What Are Interventions?
Interventions are specific user experience design elements for digital platforms, which produce—or could produce—a quantifiable prosocial outcome in controlled experiments.
Examples of prosocial outcomes could include:
Less Dysfunction
Reductions in online trolling, bias, harassment, cyberbulling, and cyberhate
More Dignity
Increased feelings of safety, recognition, inclusion, and acceptance, for users hailing from real-life, marginalized communities
More Understanding
Disagreements become more productive. Regardless of outcome, parties exit disagreements feeling as though their dignity was left intact
What are tested interventions?
Tested Interventions are interventions that the Prosocial Design Network has deemed to work, based on published and preprinted experiments.
Each tested intervention is given an evidence-grade based on the quality and quantity of the research supporting it.
From high to low, those evidence-grades are: Convincing, Likely, Possible, and Tentative.
What are Untested interventions?
Untested Interventions lack testing. However, they are included due to being: analogous to offline interventions, used in a product for prosocial aims, or otherwise having expert endorsement for prosocial outcomes.
However, as these all lack quantitative data to support them, they share the same, unique evidence grade of Untested.
What Are These Different Categories?
For ease of navigation, along with being sorted by Tested or Untested, each card belongs to one of the follow four classes of intervention:
Dispel rumors
The Dispel Rumors classification covers interventions that stop the spread of misinformation or disinformation.
'Fake News' created by Nithinan Tatah, TH, from the Noun Project
Empower connection
The Empower Connection classification includes interventions that both help people reach consensus and convey emotions more constructively.
Stop hate & bullying
The Stop Hate & Bullying classification covers interventions that both anticipate and prevent expressions of, and incitements to, hatred and harrassment.
evoke user's visibility
The Evoke User's Visibility classification addresses interventions that either remind users that they are part of a community; that they are being seen and heard, often by a larger audience than they realize; or that they are an individual human being, capable of making their own choices.
