Design Patterns: Are we looking at them from the wrong way?

Was thinking about patterns some days back and was wonder why haven’t created the impact they could have. I’m not talking about big corporation which use them extensively, but small companies or innovation oriented companies.

The reason I feel we are looking at them from the wrong perspective is because the way we structure the patterns are not easily accessible. Let look at the common scenarios of design – what time will you look for a design pattern? Most when you are taking a design decision. Lets look at the current structure of pattern libraries available on the web today. Most of the sites have them classified by their names like breadcrums, drag and drop, tabs, double tab etc. Now if you look at them from the usability perspective; while designing do you think we need breadcrums or I need a drag and drop ? The question that usually comes to mind is “I need to how the user where this current page is located”. At this point of time you want to see what all design options you have to show users the current location of the page. And here the current design pattern structure fails. Unless you know breadcrums are one of the solutions you may never be able to find the right design solution.

The current structure is usable if you know all the “names” of the design patterns that are in use. So what happens most of the time is that you end up using only those patterns that you are aware of.

Another common way that I have seen some people using is by making a self library of design patterns from the web. Designers choose certain design patterns that they like and then start to design their pages trying to some how fit those into their design. This is very negative way to approach design. Design being a problem solving process shouldn’t encourage this kind of usage to patterns.

It’s something like - to create a movie you first start to choose certain scene from other movies that you liked and then try to mix them together to create a story out of it. For better results it should be like you create the story (purpose), then look at the catalog of scene (design pattern) that fit into that story.

This tells us that its not the name of the movie clip that is important but what it shows (purpose) that is important. At the right point of time I should know which scene is to be put together by “purpose” than by it “name”.

It’s a pure information categorization issue. How to present the data to users to make it more sensible to them.

I need to see some solution to a specific information or interaction. And I should be able to find it through my problem rather than by name –

“Double Tab” – it makes sense to people who know it, but I’m sure there are a lot who don’t know the name but may be aware of the design. Thus names could be unintuitive unless we create a Nomenclature which is universal and which may also indicate the purpose of the pattern. The current categorization needs a lot of learning; we have to find ways to cut them and make it more logical.

I’m be writing about this more in future…