User interface (UI) patterns

by: Patrick Stapleton Source: boxes & arrows

Introduction

User interface (UI) patterns have the potential to make software development more efficient. The prospect of such efficiency gains has led to interest in user interface (UI) patterns by individuals and organizations looking for ways to increase quality while at the same time reducing the costs associated with software development.

The very nature of UI patterns requires that they be familiar to end-users. An individual UI pattern is a discrete, repeatable unit of user experience. I refer to collection of patterns as a library.

In many cases, less proprietary patterns are more useful in solving a design problem as they can be implemented more uniformly across platforms. This characteristic and the efficiency gains make patterns an excellent opportunity for software companies to come together and promote UI patterns to the wider development community.

Producing a common pattern library, however, implies that the patterns presented are at the very least, consistently documented and most probably presented in the same single classification system. Currently though, patterns are classified and documented in various manners across publishers with no clear standard evident.

The problem

To date, the most common approach to propagating a single user experience standard is the development of UI guidelines and principles documentation within an organization. Development teams — usually incorporating a user experience specialist — then reference this documentation during implementation and upgrade processes.

However, as the numbers of systems grow within an organization, so does the effort needed to maintain the quality and consistency of the user experience. For many organizations, it is now impossible to assign much, if any, time of a user experience specialist to all implementation efforts, and experience has shown that the UI guidelines and principles approach to propagating a single user experience standard does not scale well.

There are two common issues, both major.

The first issue is ensuring developers are familiar with all the principles and guidelines.

Documentation to fully describe a UI standard is, by its nature, extremely detailed and complex. Getting developers to know all this information intimately is an ongoing and often un-winnable battle.

The second major issue is that the application of guidelines and principles can be open to wide interpretation.

Requiring developers to combine guidelines and apply principles together to create a complete UI can be inefficient. This synthesis process can result in widely-varying solutions to a single design problem across teams — especially when working with widely distributed and possibly culturally diverse groups. Removing these variances to create a more consistent user experience requires rework.

The solution

UI patterns to a great extent mitigate the problems of weight and interpretation experienced with the principles and guidelines documentation approach of the past. In essence, patterns can be seen as prepackaged solutions based on guidelines and principles. 

Patterns and pattern libraries are more convenient for developers because they solve common higher-level design problems without the need for deep knowledge of often-complex guidelines and principles documentation. Also, they implement best practices, so developers don’t synthesize what are often “slightly original” solutions that would need to be reworked later.

Much of the value of a pattern to the developer is its less granular and more physical nature. Principles of good UI design dressed up as UI patterns add little value over traditional guidelines and principles documentation, as seen in many of the UI patterns as described in the Design of Sites; examples such as “Low Number of Files” — while an important design principle or guideline — do not deliver up a usable UI component.

Check ui pattern designs:

Also important is creating the patterns to begin with. The guidelines and principles that form the foundation of patterns still need to be developed before any patterns themselves are developed.

Source: boxes & arrows - by: Patrick Stapleton