I have been super busy lately working on the beginnings of a Mobile Pattern Library for a client. This work involves a lot of auditing applications. I am looking at both apps designed by the client and others in the landscape for comparison and for developing best practices across the iPhone, iPad, an Android handset [...]
Pattern Library
Last month I was one of the speakers at An Event Apart, Minneapolis. It was a fantastic experience and I highly recommend it. If it’s at all in your budget, get thee to An Event Apart. One of the best conferences I have ever been too. But then I am partial to very geeky things [...]
[Part 7 of a series on Patterns. Working with a Pattern Library.] Patterns, Components, and Code, Oh My! Ok, so now you have a pattern library. Now what? Ultimately, you need to be able to work with this content on a daily basis. The patterns, in and of themselves, give you the tools to understand [...]
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[Part 6 of a series on Patterns. Organizing the pattern library for a design team.] Organizing a pattern library is like organizing any other large body of content. You need to look at the content you have as well as the content to be developed and come up with a primary and a potentially a [...]
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[Part 5 of a series on Patterns. Developing a quality system.] Once you have a collection of patterns they should be reviewed by the team or designated representatives. A review process is good for catching missing issues or considerations as well as refining the problem statement and context of use. Additionally, the review process helps [...]
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The Yahoo! Pattern Library, that I founded, thanks to the insight of Irene Au (now at Google) will be moving homes from the Yahoo! Developer Network to uipatterns.org (and a redirect from opendesignpatterns.com – which already has some of the content there from an experiment I did last year) sometime in the next couple of [...]
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[Part 4 of a series on Patterns. How to write patterns once you have identified them.] Writing interaction design patterns can seem easy on the surface. After all, aren’t you just documenting an interaction snippet or module or component? Sort of. It looks easy on the surface, but the actual process of writing the pattern [...]
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[Part 3 of a series on Patterns. Understanding the concept of the reusable solution.] Identifying patterns in architecture The first thing you have to do before you can write an interaction design pattern is to understand how to identify patterns in the wild. When is something a pattern, when is it a principle or a [...]
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[Part 2 of a series on Patterns. Parts of this post excerpted in part from my work in chapter 1 of Designing Social Interfaces: Principles, Practices and Patterns for the Social Web] A brief history. The notion of using interaction design patterns in the user experience design process follows the model that computer software programming [...]
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[author's note: This is part one in a multi-part series. Based on material I developed with Christian Crumlish and Lucas Pettinati for a workshop we gave at the IA Summit in 2008 and 2009 and at Interactions 2009, I have expanded this information into a multi-day workshop and this series of articles. Once the series [...]
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A few weeks ago, I attended the UX Book club event here in San Francisco. The book in discussion was A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander. It was a lively discussion and drifted back and forth between architecture, the Yahoo! Pattern Library, our Social Patterns collection, patterns in interaction design and the motivations behind that [...]
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