I want to start with my own blog website for particular business / community.

Thanks for the feedback.

In a previous life I created a number of anti-patterns and yes they are useful. However, our patterns are geared towards our design community (particularly Yahoo! designers) and as such our focus is on patterns.

Our patterns are not created “out of the blue”. Most of the patterns have a lot of design research (user testing) behind them. We do not publish the research as that is proprietary to Yahoo! Internally our patterns reference the appropriate research findings.

Sometimes our patterns (on the public site) are a little more experimental but based on lots of examples we find across the web, cognitive research, and usually some design research.

I know that Jenifer and Martijn’s patterns emerge from observing the field of practice. And then some more abstract patterns emerge from this. eBay’s patterns are the same. They capture best practices and design research. The Oracle UI team is also creating a nice pattern library that forms itself the same way.

If you read our definition of patterns you will see how they emerge:

“Patterns are optimal solutions to common problems. As common problems are tossed around a community and are resolved, common solutions often spontaneously emerge. Eventually, the best of these rise above the din and self-identify and become refined until they reach the status of a Design Pattern.” - from IAWiki.

Beyond providing a proven solution to a given problem, I think design patterns provide us the ability to build software that employs information hiding, abstraction, and encapsulation of functionality.

Take a typical web application, and you can make discrete components of each artifact neg. links, search box, labels, buttons, tabs. The patterns provide horizontal functionality for many components, so that functionality built for one component can be re-used for others. On the UI, patterns need to provide how components interact with the user to provide a intuitive user experience.

I forgot who mentioned earlier, but one of the biggest reason for design patterns is terminology. I tend to use GoF pattern names and Java idiom names while discussing a design. Some of the people use the same patterns but have their own names for them. This difference in pattern nomenclature has led to very long meetings discussing things we shouldn’t have to be discussing. What’s worse is this difference eventually leads into the naming of classes during implementation.

The idea of patterns on the UI is an interesting idea. I think these patterns will provide us engineers with more leverage to build applications with better UIs.

Amish

There’s a big rush around design patterns these days. Something you really shouldn’t miss. Yahoo! rocks and does a great job in this area. They have a Design Pattern Library ……