In the six months that I have been working with my team – transitioning to an Agile development process and trying to figure out how UX fits in to the scheme of things, I’ve recognized a need. Our enterprise application development team does not have a documented library of internal application interaction design patterns to be used as a reference for engineers. This is forcing Business Analysts and Developers to design ad hoc interactions as applications are enhanced or refactored. This practice is causing inefficiency in the design process and inconsistency in the interface UI and interactions. Here is what I wrote to the boss:
“Critical to obvious application interaction design is the element of familiarity – so that end users’ learning curve is decreased and productivity is increased. The discovery and documentation of design patterns, common interaction solutions to common interaction problems, is an emerging best practice for internal application development efficiency. Familiar patterns help users learn new applications quickly by allowing them to draw on their experience and use it while they learn new features and functions. We know design patterns emerge when a pattern proves to be effective over time. When it works on one site, or application, others emulate the interaction pattern and when it succeeds across many common applications, users start expecting the familiarity of that type of interaction.
Unlike style guides and guidelines, patterns explicitly focus on context of use and tell the designer when, how and why the solution can be applied. Patterns capture a common structure, usually a very familiar one that is easy to recognize, without being too concrete on the details, giving the flexibility to be creative, unlike style guides.
Discovering and then documenting internal design patterns will reduce the design time for engineers if we develop a reference point for them to solve interaction design problems. An added benefit is that this practice will ensure consistency in the application user experience……”
He asked me how we would do this, and here is what I thought we’d try.
- Discover existing interaction solutions to common interaction design problems found in web and mobile applications and document their use in an Interaction Design Pattern Format
- Document anomalies to those patterns and make recommendations for improving consistency
- Develop a searchable, scalable library of interaction patterns for use throughout the enterprise
Just because I am a musical theatre geek and this tune has been running around my brain:
“I love you madly, madly Madam Librarian…Marian …”
Does anybody out there have any experience with this?
Will you share how interaction pattern libraries have helped you in:
- Teaching best practices and common approaches by showing rather than telling
- Capturing collective wisdom of designers/developers across many uses and scenarios
- Making usable designs the “path of least resistance”
- Eliminate wasted time spent “reinventing the wheel”
- Ensuring users have a consistent and predictable experience within an application or service
- Giving teams a common language, reducing misunderstandings that crop up from different·vocabulary use
- Reducing time and costs in the design and development lifecycle
Please write.
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