A lot of interesting points along this thread. Wesley's comments are very interesting. One thing about Yahoo's library worth noting is that we are far from a centralized organization. We have a central UED team but it's small and the vast majority of our designers work in business units. It's difficult for us, culturally, to mandate anything.
Smaller houses, I think, in many ways can have it easier at least insofar as their ability to create a pattern repository and designate it as "required" (within reason). On 10/18/07, Janna Hicks DeVylder <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > This is exactly why I'm so excited Christian Crumlish from Yahoo! has heeded > the call to reflect on (and share with us publicly, thank you!) the impact > of using an internal pattern library over a substantial amount of time. I > *believe* their internal library had a rating system associated with each > pattern, where team members across the organization could rate...something > about the pattern. Actually, the ratings are adherence levels. There are currently three ratings possible once a pattern is out of the draft stage: working solution, best practice, and The Yahoo! Way. A working solution is a reliable approach that the designer is free to apply or ignore or their own recognizance. A best practice is a pattern we are strongly encouraging designers to apply (when appropriate, of course), but that they can deviate from with the signoff of their manager. Very few things are designated The Yahoo! Way (and they often have to do with branding and the suchlike). I like to say it takes "an act of Jerry" to get dispensation to violate a pattern rated thusly. Its utility? Its appropriateness? Its effectiveness in > addressing the problem? I want to learn if the patterns were applied > inappropriately early on, but after time/education/usage, did the error rate > decrease? As alluded to earlier, our problems have almost never been people overapplying the patterns but the opposite problem of people overlooking them. > And are there any checks and balances to make sure the pattern is > being applied appropriately? I feel like that's just simple management or > peer review of work, but how does that impact the pattern itself? After > applying a pattern in a project, is there any reflection on how well it > worked within the pattern documentation? There is an informal feedback loop. One interesting thing is that I'm working with a regional group of what we call "Intls" in Asia who are putting together their own localized ui pattern library and they are learning from our experience and innovating in interesting ways that I anticipate imitating once they've proven out some of these improvements. They're being much more strict about associating wireframe and comp templates, and code, with patterns; they're being more systematic about documenting page types, *and* they've built in an element for associating product releases with patterns (as in "these four properties all use this pattern"). -xian- -- Christian Crumlish http://xianlandia.com Yahoo! pattern detective http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns IA Institute director of technology http://iainstitute.org ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://gamma.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://gamma.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://gamma.ixda.org/help
