Design Patterns Conversation

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May 24, 2006 at 10:40 am by Bill Scott | In Design |

Luke Wroblewski (formerly eBay patterns; current Yahoo!), Jenifer Tidwell (author of Designing Interfaces & Common Grounds pattern library), Martijn van Welie (pattern author), James Refell (eBay patterns) and myself (Yahoo! patterns) have started a series of conversations around Design Patterns. You can find the first installments on Luke’s blog.

Here is how Luke introduces the conversation thread:

In the Spring of 2006, a group of designers intimately familiar with the organization and development of design pattern resources got together to discuss the current and future role of design patterns in the real world. We talked about defining and documenting patterns, the context required to communicate how patterns should be applied, what it takes to develop a design language, and how disparate lists of patterns could converge. It’s our hope this conversation continues.

Here are the current posts:

Enjoy the conversations, and we look forward to your contributions!

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Operating systems are the first to dictate a design pattern. Windows and Mac users expect to see the same operation experience inside of their browsers. By principle, keeping close to an OS-like environment in web UI’s is the best place to start.

Comment by Pixelsplasher — May 24, 2006 #
[…] Design Patterns Conversation: “Luke Wroblewski (formerly eBay patterns; current Yahoo!), Jenifer Tidwell (author of Designing Interfaces & Common Grounds pattern library), Martijn van Welie (pattern author), James Refell (eBay patterns) and myself (Yahoo! patterns) have started a series of conversations around Design Patterns. You can find the first installments on Luke’s blog. […]

Pingback by Design Patterns Conversation — May 24, 2006 #
I’m a newcomer in this AJAX world and right now I’m acting mostly like a sponge soaking up information, and patterns are, let’s say, well structured information. I have read the posts and also the YUI design patterns (and many more) but I partially disagree with your approach to the problem. Patterns (and maybe you should also address the antipatterns issue) are derived from a long trail of trials and failures and refining an idea. And while experience really helps in shortening the trail (and you are all experienced) I think creating patterns out of the blue is not a very good approach. So what are the bases that stands under your designs?

Comment by Remus Stratulat — May 24, 2006 #
Interface Design Patterns…

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 ……

Trackback by The world of Desineo — May 25, 2006 #
[…] Design Patterns Conversation […]

Pingback by 二三街角 » 2006-05-25 Information Flow — May 25, 2006 #
[…] Design Patterns Conversation » Yahoo! User Interface Blog […]

Pingback by PJ Kix > Hi-tek / Lo-life » Blog Archive » Design Patterns Conversation » Yahoo! User Interface Blog — May 25, 2006 #
I’ve spent most of my time building server-side software, where the use of design patterns, like those from the GoF, is every-day practice. I look design patterns as a means to facilitate proven solutions for repetitive or like problems. Some times, I haven’t been able to figure out a pattern to satisfy a given problem. Many of those times, its required me to take a step back and think of it in a more abstract way.

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

Comment by Amish — May 27, 2006 #
Remus,

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.

Comment by Bill Scott — June 1, 2006 #
[…] Encontré esta muy interesante conversación sobre el concepto de Desing patterns, concepto que hoy en día utiliza Yahoo! para el diseño y desarrollo de sus interfaces. […]

Pingback by Matiasjajaja - Novedades digitales y Web Actual » Blog Archive » Conversación sobre al concepto de Design Patterns — June 5, 2006 #
I’m lookin for a design pattern or framework for blog application.

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

Comment by milind — July 17, 2006 #

Yahoo! User Interface Blog