Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Juan Lanus

Juan Lanus — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 17:28:54 GMT

Hmm … a central repository … will I be able to upload my “deviation”? (Hi, San Ideos!)
I truly believe that my deviation is the actual thing, and that the version described there, that one is a deviation!
But I’m not against patterns as long as … nothing.
In my opinion the patterns should be local to a project, or a company. Company wide patterns foster the pursued normalized corporative look and feel. Project patterns are for product normalization.
Too much patterns are impossible to enforce because it’s difficult to remember the relationships between UI problems and solutions one has never used.
But there must be an authority regulating the application.
For example in a business application the authority has to stick a pattern to each data item, like “the address will be entered using pattern A4 and displayed like B5”.
Actually this happens at a more technical level it’s called “user controls” or something like that: a piece of software that exposes specified data and behavior.
In software architecture there are patterns, many of them, maybe hundreds. Our nifty chief architect, Pablo Graña, oversees dozens of projects here at Globant because this is an outsourcing company, and he recalls using less than a dozen. And he is really prone to canned, pretested, solutions.
He says that many patterns are being used unknowingly. Which is another view of what I say: one can not bear a whole patterns catalog in memory.
And finally, applying patterns kills the feeling of being creative, even if one knows it’s illusory.

Juan Lanus — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 19:40:22 GMT

Interestingly, this same issue of B&A has an article about using wikis for UI docs, which can be a starting point for The Repository.
Also, HFI recently published the findings of the 2009 UX Maturity Survey (http://www.humanfactors.com/UXMaturitySurvey.asp). Among tops challenges they list “A team that reinvents the wheel”.
All signs that the UX profession is moving from spotty and guru driven to institutionalized. Or at least there is a pattern here.

Juan Lanus — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 17:30:59 GMT

Luis Soares (two comments above this one), actually if the consumers of the patterns can’t find them there is an usability issue. Usability of the internal system, I mean.

It’s not only a matter of publishing a list of patterns but also making them reachable to the consumers, as you said.
Thus, the publishers should not rely on the consumers looking for an exact term but instead opening the list of terms as in the web pages “keywords” meta tag.

If the users are allowed to enter the name of the concepts that led them to a particular pattern then a semantic network would build.

Another method is to publish mockups of already dome work with the contained artifacts linked to the pattern used in the solution.