Blog on the Side

My Developer's Wish List - A Pattern Library - Sometimes I think I'm always talking about the importance of having a site style guide, setting editorial guidelines and creating a site dictionary of preferred terms. Everyone seems to agree but getting these documents created can be a challenge.

Once they're developed, it's usually a bigger hurdle to get everyone on board with using the standards and with evolving them. Often documentation feels cold and fixed and far from the specific situation that you're facing.

That's why I was so excited when I stumbled upon Yahoo!'s Design Pattern Library. According to their site, "a pattern library describes an optimal solution to a common problem with a specific context."

This site is a gold mine -- whether you're designing breadcrumbs, search results, tabbed navigation, rate this site, write a review and so on. Check the context - how similar is it to your own? What are their design goals? What did they consider and what did they recommend? We don't all want to do it like Yahoo, but we could start from here. Library users spend more time on other other sites than on our own. The more that library webmasters adopt and use standard conventions that our users already know, the easier it is for them to use our site.

Not only is this site a great resource, it's also a great teaching tool. It's a way to share knowledge quickly with library web developers and webmasters, who don't have the time to read all the computer-human literature and studies. They can figure out optimal approaches to common interface design problems as needed and your own pattern library would be tuned just for your audience and their needs. Each topic in the pattern library topic describes the particular problem at hand, the solution and the rationale. By posting the pattern library in a wiki or blog, you would allow people to discuss or share "similar" but "related" areas where they have applied or adapted the solution.