Yahoo! Design Pattern Library

by February 13, 2006

Today Yahoo! released our internal Yahoo! Design Pattern Library under a Creative Commons License. This first release of interaction design patterns is small (just 13) but we'll be adding to it over the next few months.

Now, why is this significant?

At the AJAX Summit I attended last May, the topic of standards for AJAX-enabled Web applications came up. How should interface designers account for the rapid, incremental UI updates that AJAX makes possible? Should we leverage the ideas already making their way online or pursue unique solutions independently? Which of these methods would provide answers that could ultimately become recommendations rather than conventions?

This question and others like it seem ripe for an Interaction Design group to address. Though independent authors often respond to such needs by sharing their thoughts and experiences online, published guidelines or recommendations backed by an Interaction Design group could go further.

This is what the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library provides: a set of common patterns emerging on Yahoo! freely available for discussion and use. Going forward many of these design patterns will link directly to Yahoo’s code library (filled with Ajax/DHTML drag and drop, animation, event management, widgets, etc) for examples and help in implementing design solutions. Congratulations to Bill, Erin, and the rest of the Yahoo! team in getting this out the door!

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