Do you work with humans? OK...then read this book. Clear? Awesome. 

You want people to use your systems? Your courses? Your learning experiences? Then read this book. This book won't do it all for you but it goes a long way. I think it also addresses user interaction in a way that we don't usually think of when designing courses. I'm just sitting here looking at the cover of this book and seeing that humans are pretty apparent in the title (hint: social means human)...then I think about something like "Instructional Systems Design" and it's a little less easy to see where humans fit in. 

When is the last time you thought about the flow that you create for students when they sign up for a course? Did you even think about it at all? These folks did. They worked for companies like Yahoo! where people would vote with their mouse button if the flow of an experience on a site wasn't compelling or welcoming. 

The authors talk about social user experience patterns and describe a pattern here as:

"A pattern describes an optimal solution to a common problem within a specific context. A pattern is not a finished piece of code or design. Rather, it reflects the sum total of a community's knowledge and experience or expertise in a given domain."

Now social media and or social learning is all the rage but unless we want to turn this powerful moment into something approaching our grand e-learning design concepts like which corner do we put the Next button in, then we need to get smarter on design. Design that's like Soylent Green - about people. So read the book. Visit the Wiki. Let's figure out how to design systems for humans, not just systems that include humans.