Christian Crumlish of Yahoo! and Austin Govella of Comcast joined together at this year’s IA Summit to discuss their use of design patterns.

Here are my Twitter notes:

Christian Crumlish:

• Starting off with Christopher Alexander’s “A Pattern Language”
• Reference to Jennifer Tidwell’s “Designing Interfaces”
• Yahoo’s Pattern Library (which Christian curates) launched in 2005. Article by Erin Malone, Matt Leacock and Chanel Wheeler
• Patterns are to: “not reinvent the wheel promote familiar UX free up designers to do innovative leading-edge work”
• “Do design patterns stifle innovation? No. Now shut up and do your wireframe”
• What’s a pattern: problem, solution, context, examples. High-level based on principles linking to related specs and docs
• Yahoo!’s UX folks check the library, give feedback, suggest a pattern and help write or review a pattern
• Pictures of interfaces aren’t exactly patterns. They aren’t newly invented approaches but rather the tried and true ones
• Need to age-date patterns to keep them fresh, review quarterly, listen to user feedback, update and revise as necessary
• Wireframe and diagram stencils make it easier for designers to adopt patterns.
• Dev needs reference to example code. Pattern + Stencil + Code = a very useful building block

Austin Govella:

• Austin showing a cute photo of his wife and kid. “This is what you can do with patterns…He’s in beta”
• Referencing Jess McMullin’s Design Literacy [can't find link]
• See, hear, do. Pattern libraries let you see, but it’s a cultural artifact in the organization that needs to be discussed
• Patterns have to make people’s jobs easier or they won’t care
• Patterns in agile: make it super clear to Dev where the pattern exists and when, i.e. error conditions
• Patterns make wireframing so much easier! Let them be much more high-fidelity and accurate because they’re templatized

Note: No slides have been posted yet. Will update this when they have.

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