Over the past few months I conducted an audit of the patterns in Yahoo!'s internal design pattern library, with an eye toward publishing as many of them as possible in the open library at YDN . Why? Well, for one thing, to get more eyeballs on them,...

Can you describe the stencils you contributed, why you made them, and what you personally use them for? I created a customizable, vector-based iPhone stencil library for InDesign . They came about as a result of several conversations that ultimately...

Please tell me your professional role and anything else about yourself and your background you'd like to share. My colleague, Chas Linn and I founded Model Interaction Ltd a little over two years ago. We’ve both worked within the interaction design...

Just recently I published a new pattern, Sign-in Continuity , to the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library . It could be filed under "Engagement," a category we have internally but that hasn't appeared yet here, but I decided to put it in the "Social"...

Recently, we released a family of related Reputation patterns to the Yahoo Design Pattern Library, the first of several collections of social-design related patterns that we're working on. These patterns are somewhat different from the typical UI or...

Dragos Manolescu from Microsoft Live Labs and Joe Yoder from The Refactory are organizing a pattern-mining workshop at TOOLS 2008 Europe , July 5-6 (dates still to be confirmed) in Zurich, Switzerland. I've agreed to be on the program committee to...

As the end of last year was winding up I spent some time tinkering with the open pattern library, in order to clear the way for our latest pattern release, Carousel . One reason why I needed to do this tinkering is that the Carousel pattern contains...

Things have been quiet recently in Yahoo's open pattern library, but behind the scenes we've been working on some cool stuff. First of all, we've reorganized the navigation for Yahoo!'s internal library and have now updated the navigation of the...

We recently celebrated the one-year anniversary of the open-source release of the YUI Library . It is also the one-year anniversary of the public release of the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library . Not wanting to miss out on the fun, we published two new...

Q: What's the best way to communicate a pattern? James Reffell UI Design Manager, eBay Inc. Curator, eBay Pattern Engine I'm constantly amazed at the power of design patterns to communicate. I've found that a well-described pattern can both convey...

Q: What's the best way to communicate a pattern? Martijn van Welie Senior Interaction Designer, Satama Amsterdam Curator, Patterns in Interaction Design Patterns communicate design solutions. Jenifer states that they communicate from "one designer...

Q: What's the best way to communicate a pattern? Bill Scott Ajax Evangelist, Yahoo! Inc. Blogger, Looks Good Works Well Former Curator, Yahoo! Design Pattern Library The question of "What is the best way to communicate patterns?" has several...

Q: What's the best way to communicate a pattern? Luke Wroblewski Principal Designer, Yahoo! Inc. Founder/Principal, LukeW Interface Designs Author, Site-Seeing: A Visual Approach to Web Usability Jenifer makes some great points about the key...

Q: What's the best way to communicate a pattern? Jenifer Tidwell Interaction designer/software developer, The MathWorks Author, Designing Interfaces Curator, UI Patterns and Techniques Patterns communicate design ideas from one designer to another....

Luke Wroblewski (formerly eBay patterns; current Yahoo!), Jenifer Tidwell (author of Designing Interfaces & Common Grounds pattern library), Martijn van Welie (pattern author), James Refell (eBay patterns) and myself (Yahoo! patterns) have started a...

With the widespread acceptance of Ajax (and the resurgence of Flash) new ways of interacting on the web have emerged. In many ways, these interactions are not new. Interactions like drag and drop and inline editing have been mainstream on desktop...

In this release of the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library we are offering a set of 11 patterns for creating visual transitions. These come under the umbrella of the Transition pattern. There is no doubt that visual transitions can be abused. In fact,...

Problem Summary A product or website needs to present ratings and reviews with a variety of informational elements. Unlike the other patterns released today, this pattern is a pure information architecture pattern. It describes what informational...

Problem Summary The user needs to enter an item into a text box which could ambiguous or hard to remember and therefore has the potential to be mis-typed. Auto Complete is under-utilized in most web sites and web applications. Most text fields could...

Problem Summary The user needs to be able to navigate up (towards the root page) and have an understanding of where she is in relation to the rest of the site. The name breadcrumbs is probably a misnomer . Since it invokes the thought of Hansel &...

Problem Summary The user needs needs to re-arrange the layout of modules on a web page directly with the mouse. Drag and drop has been a common feature on desktop applications for many years. It is only recently that it has found its way to the web....

Problem Summary The user needs to navigate through one or more stacked panes of content without refreshing the page. The challenge here is to distinguish tabs that control content within a page from general site navigation tabs. The approach we take...

Problem Summary The user needs to navigate through a site to locate content and features and have clear indication of their current location in the site. The pattern can be found at: Navigation Tabs .

Problem Summary The user needs to view data items from a potentially large set of sorted data that will not be easy to display within a single page. There are other patterns in this area that we will be documenting in the future. One of those is the...

Problem Summary A user wants to quickly leave their opinion on an object, with minimal interruption to any other task flow they are involved in. One excellent design principle to follow is to allow the user to leave a light footprint. This means...

Problem Summary The user needs to view a set of search results ranked by relevance that is too large to easily display within a single page. Search pagination focuses on controlling paging through search results that are usually sorted by relevance....

Problem Summary User wants to share her opinion with others about an object (place, person, thing) in greater detail than a simple rating. While the Architecture of a Review pattern discusses the information architecture elements of a review, This...

I'm excited to announce that today we are releasing the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library to the public under a friendly Creative Commons License . The goal in releasing this library is for us to share the common patterns that we see emerging at Yahoo!...