The earliest pattern books were created by the Roman architect Vitruvius wherein he describes best practices for siting buildings, proper arrangement of rooms, external ornamentation, fenestration, etc.   Christopher Alexander coined the term “pattern language” in his 1977 book that focused on designing buildings and ranged from the macro (regional planning) to the micro (interior window treatments).

Jennifer Tidwell started an early effort to catalog UI patterns online which resulted in her book Designing Interfaces.  Yahoo’s design pattern library is a popular site for Ux designers interested in pattern languages.  There are many web sites on UI patterns that can be found using Google.

My team is currently in the process of constructing a set of UI pattern libraries that will serve as the canonical design references for our entire product suite. Our pattern library is divided into two core areas:  Product patterns, and Visual patterns. The two libraries are linked to one another. The product pattern library details all of the core structural elements and behaviors in our products.  The structural elements display data, allow users to navigate, etc.  Behavioral elements deal with things like drag-and-drop, selection,  etc.  The visual pattern library deals with all of the visual language aspects in the products, e.g., colors, fonts, icon styles, layout, sizing, etc.

The product pattern library utilizes a wire-frame, gray-scale drawing style with lots of diagrams, and callouts to illustrate how each pattern works.  The visual pattern library utilizes high-fidelity, pixel-accurate drawings.   We created the two libraries so that we won’t need to rework all the images and diagrams in the product pattern library whenever we update the visual language.

We expect to achieve substantial productivity gains and process efficiencies using the pattern libraries.  Each product specification we create is linked to the pattern libraries.  Rather than having to describe all of the behaviors for a table or tree control in the spec, we can simply illustrate the design, provide a minimal description of the strutural, behavioral, and visual elements, and include a link to the corresponding pages in the pattern libraries.

As my company and the Ux team scale into smoothly-functioning global organizations we will be able to coordinate the work of designers, engineers, quality assurance, and documentation teams around the world using the pattern libraries as a key reference and communication tool.

Given my education in Industrial Design (ID), that was a natural first place to see what models might translate.  Yes, there is all the prototyping, mockups, and rendering that are highly applicable to any software project.  However ID doesn’t really do it because it is classic “waterfall-based” design approach.  There is no other choice when designing for manufacturing on an assembly line.  Everything has to be defined up front in order to build the tooling and stamp out the parts.

Next, I looked to Architecture (the building kind).  Although I’m not an Architect, nor do I have Architectural training, I helped to re-design the kitchen and master bedroom/bathroom of my house. I also served as general contractor on the kitchen remodel.  Building buildings is a lot more like software development than ID.  You try to define most things before construction begins, but there are always quite a

number of things that can only be tackled as you get to them in the construction process.

I know the big deal with Agile is that design, implementation, testing, etc. are all supposed to proceed in parallel.  But IMO this is an immature perspective on requirements and design. Agile development was created by software developers, not designers.

What I’ve come to strongly believe in through repeated exposure to Agile development projects is that Agile development must be proceeded by some iterations of Agile requirements and design.  This needs to happen BEFORE any coding actually begins.  Prototyping during the requirements and design phase is OK, but trying to create production-code and test it is a mistake during this phase.

I don’t believe you need a lot of these design iterations before coding starts.  You just need to ensure that you’ve:

1. Got the right requirements
2. Defined the big pieces of your product’s information architecture, navigation model, and the key surfaces
3. Validated your design concepts with users

Once you’ve gotten the big design pieces reasonably defined; the traditional, synchronous work of Agile can begin.   Using this approach allows the design details to  plug into the larger design architecture more easily and rationally.

1. Product UI designs should be based on real-world use cases & customer needs
2. There are multiple possible solution spaces for any design problem—each one has relative pros & cons
3. Design assumptions & decisions should be VALIDATED with users (and your sales team) BEFORE “beau coup” dollars are spent on implementing them
4. This point is somewhat orthogonal to the above, but is important if you are designing a suite of products;  in this case you should be leveraging design patterns & standards across those tools in order to ensure transfer of training, ease of learning & use, and coherence within the suite

This doesn’t mean that Ux design is easy or trivial, or that by simply following these steps you will end up with good products.  However if you don’t follow these steps in your process you can pretty much be assured of ending up with products that suck.

Payne’s interview focused on the US presidential elections of 2008. She described politics as essentially a supply chain problem. Payne went on to describe how we ought to conceptualize political change through the metaphor of the skipper, the boat, and the river. Her message has a direct application to User Experience teams.

The skipper is the Ux team leader. The skipper is responsible for charting the course of the boat, steering it, and ensuring the well being of the crew.  The skipper must be attentive to whether the boat is well maintained and cared for.  They are the “face” of the Ux team to the broader company.

The boat consists of the  Ux team members, the artifacts the team produces, and the internal processes used to produce those artifacts. The skipper is nothing without their boat.  The Ux team members (the crew) are important representatives to other teams at the company–most typically at the project level.

The river is the company’s culture–how it approaches design, production, and marketing of its products. Shaping and changing the nature of the relationship between the Ux team and the company’s processes is key to ensuring the Ux team’s ongoing success.  The Ux team must be constantly attentive to how its activities are leveraged and plugged into the overall activities of the company.

Musee du quai Branley in Paris

The installations were strikingly attractive, rich in color and texture. The scale of some of these were immense. While most of us have seen ivy-covered walls and mossy walkways, what made these so interesting for me were the variety of the plantings, and their incorporation into unique architectural environments distinct from gardens. Blanc turns what would normally be bland architectural surfaces into living, growing garden-spaces.

The vertical gardens are created by attaching some type of felt to a PVC framework. Various species of plants capable of shallow rooting and vertical orientation are then stapled to the felt where their roots take hold. A network of pipes and tubes carries mineral-rich water to the plants. According to Blanc, his interest in gardens, plants, and life in general date to a boyhood fascination with aquariums and aquatic plants.

Blanc has developed a technique that allows architecture to become garden. Can you imagine an entire city or city street growing up like this? How would it feel to stroll, shop, live, and have coffee in such a luscious blend of the natural and the man-made?

Vertical garden on a storefront

I love it when a designer is able to fire up my imagination like this. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about how cool it would be to grow a vertical garden on an ugly section of backyard fence I’ve been neglecting for quite some time.

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