ExperienceCurve by Karl Long

I just heard about Yahoo’s new UI blog which I think is rather exciting to read about how that team is crafting the customer experience at Yahoo.

An extremely tantalizing titbit though is the open sourcing of some Yahoo “design patterns” . A design pattern is a solution to a common design problem or “use case”, Yahoo defines a pattern as:

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Interestingly Yahoo has divided these into two catagories, of “user needs to…” and “application needs to…”

In the benefit of design patterns is it frees designers of the minutiae of solving the mundane and lets them focus on creating the more important differentiated experiences. The last 10 years designers have been solving the same problems over and over again, analogous to car designers trying to decide on steering wheel placement and which direction the wheels should rotate every time they designed a car.

These patterns are really useful and the idea of open sourcing them is a wonderful step and I applaud Yahoo for it.

I wonder what Jacob will have to say about this, he’s been trying to set the standards on the web for a while