When we were reviewing research and surveys for the YDN redesign, real forums, that could be searched, that could have code snippets inserted, that could be granular down to the API - or pattern - were one of the top requested features.

Check them out and join the conversation.

Supposedly being on vacation and “getting away”, I found myself checking in frequently to my email, my IM, my facebook and my twitter account.

Our book proposal revisions have been submitted to the editor we are working with at O’Reilly so there is a brief pause there for a week or so.

Have an idea for a book proposal for Lou Rosenfeld so will try to work that up over this break.

New homepage design and articles to wrangle for next issue of Without Lenses.

Not really very unplugged.

I’ll have to work on that a bit over the next couple of weeks.

I can finally share…

On August 1st, the partners of BranchLogic - Bruce Charonnet and James Young - and I - formerly of Yahoo! - will be creating a new company called Tangible user experience. [website in the works]

I first met James and Bruce when I moved out to California. Bruce was my art director at Adobe and James was a colleague. We went on to work together at the end of Zip2 and at AltaVista, building out the Live portal, and I hired BranchLogic - specifically James - to work for us at AOL and brought them in on projects while at Yahoo!

What’s interesting to me is that we have each worked for each other and with each other on every kind of project imaginable. I am pretty confident that this is going to be a success.

The work and mission are much the same as what BranchLogic has been doing for the last 9 years - full service user experience consulting and in-house placement of talent. Some of the differences for the new company will come from my partnership with them: bringing the pattern love to the table, talent acquisition and coaching, content strategy and writing, a talk and workshop here and there, as well as the standard ID and IA work. I hope to be leading some project teams and spending time finding new folks to work with.

I will be based out of my home office in SF - except for when I need to be with people and then you’ll find me in some coffee shop or hanging out in someone’s conference room at their office. oh, to buy a blackberry or an iPhone?

I will also be working on a couple of book ideas and developing talks on social design and patterns and workshops around the pattern library. There are already a couple of workshops being planned for the fall with my Yahoo! compatriots - Christian Crumlish and Lucas Pettinati - where we will be teaching our pattern workshop again.

But first….I am taking 3 weeks off.

So far this point of view has worked for me. In the last four years, my hiring practices have fit within the larger Yahoo! way of hiring - phone screens, design presentation, design exercise, one on one interviews - and the collective wisdom of the team influences and has a say in the final hiring process. We tend to bring people into the team that are a good fit with the team, which means we like them personally. All other things generally have been well filtered - portfolio qualifications, experience. But team fit is invaluable. Politics, group dynamics and interpersonal relations are critical to the success of the team in meeting it’s goals.

As I prep to leave my full-time in-house job at Yahoo!, I have been thinking about how much I will miss my team and the people that I brought into the company. The daily interactions, the shared joking, the hard work and projects completed as a team, etc. On the one hand I am sorry to go and leave them behind. On the other hand, I am glad to be changing roles, because now I won’t be “the boss” but can be colleagues and friends with many of these people.

As a manager it can sometimes be tough. I have to create a separation between myself and these people that I like. While the team can be friendly with each other, I can’t “really” be friends as there lies a conflict of interest should issues arise or at performance review time. It’s a double edge sword. You don’t want people on your team that you can’t stand to be around so you hire people like yourself that you like being around but you also must maintain a level of objectivity when dealing with personnel. I sometimes even find myself “glad” when someone moves out of my team to go to another group or another company and we can finally be on equal footing.

I genuinely care for many of the folks that I have worked with over the years and am looking forward to shifting the dynamics of our working relationships as I leave Yahoo! and move into a new role.

the company is being whipped about in the press daily and it’s not pretty. but internally, at least in the YDN group and the larger open strategy teams, there is a lot of really interesting stuff going on. since I made the decision to leave, I am asking myself every day if its the right move, if its the right time, if I am making a mistake. i have a lot invested in the pattern library and want to see it continue to grow and be an asset to the design community and am extremely proud of the people I have brought into the company. i have been driving the redesign of the Yahoo! Developer Network and hate to leave before it’s finished (I hate unfinished projects) and I want to know how it all turns out for the YOS launches. Note: I am one of those people who skips ahead in mystery books because I CANT STAND not knowing what happens.

but deep down, I know I am doing the right thing for myself and that the time is right - otherwise why would I have been thinking about this since February; why would I have been open to listening to what recruiters and other hiring managers at other companies had to say; why would I have sought out this opportunity I am about to go be a part of?

in some ways, i think its good to be torn. to leave on good terms and know that if I ever chose to come back, that the door is open. i’d much rather feel this way than to be running from the place.

over the past 4 years I have seen the company triple in size and scale, I have hired close to 30 people - some of who are still here and others who have moved on. i have done some amazing things - most notable the internal and the public pattern libraries. i have learned so much about managing, about creative teams, about brand and customer experience, about user research and really probing to understand what users need even when they dont know it and about what really makes me happy in my day to day work. i have made some great friends, met some amazingly smart people across all the disciplines and I hope that I leave Y! a better place for the efforts I have put in.

my last day is July 11th and then a brief break before moving onto a new adventure.

The interviews went well and we saw quite a lot of talented folks. We even narrowed it down to two really qualified candidates, eventually deciding on one to make an offer to. That part all went great.

What I noticed though, was my own reaction was different than in the past. For the first time, I felt old. Not only were these candidates young, they were kids. They could realistically even be my own kid. Yikes! What the hell happened here.

For the first time I feel like there isn’t the old fogey / learned wise one that I get to learn from - I have become that person. It’s a very disconcerting feeling to have full realization of this cycle of change, of this passing of knowledge and wisdom, of being the one on the end run of a career instead of the beginning of a career when everything is new and unknown.

I like to think I am mid-career and according to many definitions and books about such things, I am right on schedule. But that said, I am having to come to grips with this feeling and am working to figure what I do about it. I am excited to build out the team with people bringing a fresh perspective and excitement to the company. I do, however, have to remind myself to not call this new team member “the kid” or other such inappropriate terms and to be a mentor and guide.

These patterns are as much best practices as traditional interaction patterns. The patterns are divided into the main types of reputation you can offer on your site to your users and they go into details around the motivation for why you might want to offer one type versus another or why you might want to combine different types of reputation.

The starting pattern is the Competitive Spectrum, which gives an overview across a range of the various types of reputation that can be offered and what motivations they address. There are nice graphics accompanying each pattern and pointers to both Yahoo! and non-Yahoo! examples for each type. It’s a great set for teams working in the social / community space and is the first batch in a larger planned set of social and community patterns.

I like to think I had something to contribute to these since for much of the time that Bryce was working on the reputation platform, he was on my team and I often had feedback sessions on the work. But really, I think its more wishful thinking than anything since the folks who worked on these are so smart and well versed on the topic.

We have now pushed these stencils live out onto the Yahoo! Pattern Library for anyone to download and use. They are given out under the Creative Commons attribution license and can be reused, remixed, and otherwise shared.

We will continue to add to these as we add patterns and components to the libraries.

I hope that people find them useful in helping quick start their design efforts and in helping create a bridge between design and code (all the YUI components have code to support them at the YUI site).

Please let us know if you have issues with any of these and if you have ideas for new components we should be adding to the suite.

Midway in the year, we started working on concepts for off-network release of these ideas and this became known internally as our Open Strategy. We worked for weeks with some great product and technical strategists and developed interesting user stories to sell the idea up the chain.
Eventually, the Open Strategy and many of the concepts we developed became part of our corporate big bets - Y!OS is #3 and this in turn helped instigate a reorganization and realignment of the company. Matt Leacock is leading the way from the interaction design and system wide design perspective.

Neil Sample, our chief strategic architect for the open strategy gave a great deep dive talk about Y!OS at Web 2.0. This video shares the vision and details more of the concepts of the architecture for how developers will be able to build on Yahoo! and the types of APIs that will be available off Yahoo! that tap into our amazing breadth and wealth of user data - most specifically the results of the social design work we were doing last year.

I am proud to have been part of the early process of Y! OS and now to be part of the team that will be helping to evangelize and spread the word about the amazing things we have to offer a wide array of developers and publishers out there. As part of the ongoing rollout this year of the Y! OS parts, we will be publishing related interaction design patterns and best practices to accompany the developer APIs and documentation.

Keep your eyes open and check design.yahoo.com periodically.