[Sigia-l] Yahoo's Pattern Design Library

[Christopher Fahey]

As many here already know, Yahoo's interaction design department has an
intranet dedicated to sharing interface design conventions and standards
(or, to use the current hip jargon, "Design Patterns") for their internal
development teams, to ensure quality and consistency of interface widgets.
It's a kind of IA style guide for common user interface elements like
breadcrumbs, pagination, tabbing, etc. There's even a blog so that Yahoo's
internal users can update or discuss each element in the library.

Some of the Yahoo team wrote about the whole process a while ago at Boxes
and Arrows. 
http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/implementing_a_pattern_library_in_the_rea
l_world_a_yahoo_case_study

At the time, I was pretty skeptical about the extravagance of the project:
It seemed unfathomably unrealistic for any company besides one as big as
Yahoo to build their own internal interaction design pattern library and
blog system.

But now Yahoo has gone ahead and released the darn thing publicly:
http://developer.yahoo.net/ypatterns/index.php

It's far from complete right now, but there's a lot of very cool stuff
already posted. And the TBD pages look like they'll be really interesting,
too. I highly recommend it. It's basically a library of "best practices" for
common IA problem solving. 

This is not to suggest that Yahoo's patterns are the ONLY way to solve these
everyday design problems. But Yahoo's implementations of these widgets are
largely elegant, simple, flexible across massively diverse products and
services, and of course rigorously tested with hundreds of millions of real
users. 

-Cf

Christopher Fahey
____________________________
Behavior
http://www.behaviordesign.com