January 30, 2010

First we take London: The Social Pattern Detective in Europe

A week or so ago I undertook a whirlwind visit to the UK and the Continent, giving two presentations about design patterns and social design, one in London on Tuesday, and another in Berlin on Thursday, each event sponsored by YDN (and the one in Germany co-sponsored by the local IxDA group).

The London event was in a wonderful gallery/cafe venue called Wallacespace filled with a standing-room only crowd. I was pleased to see a couple of friends from the international UX community there and the audience as a whole was wonderful, attentive, and ready with interesting, challenging questions for me when I was done.

Afterward we ate some snacks and drank some beers courtesy of YDN, before heading over to a nearby pub for more beers and conversation. This was my first time back in London in fourteen years and I was impressed by the vibrancy of the web-design community in what may be the "capital" of the Web in Europe.

The next day I headed to Berlin, where a pal picked me up at the airport and helped me get settled in my hotel in Alexanderplatz. It's actually been 20 years since I was in Berlin! Back then, the Wall had only recently been dismantled and the east was frozen in a sort of time capsule due to economic stagnation. A lot has happened since Berlin reunited and resumed its role as the capital of Germany and arts mecca of Mitteleuropa. In fact, there was a fashion convention going on during my visit, so the airport and hotel were full of people who made me feel, in comparison, more like a geek than a designer.

East Berlin is now full of trendy gentrified neighborhoods. I had lunch at a burrito place (!) called Dolores that's decorated with maps of the Mission in San Francisco. Clearly the internet-savvy crowd in Berlin feels a kinship with our own community in the Bay Area.

Berlin is also the home of a thriving local Interaction Design Association (IxDA) group, which helped secure the venue for my talk--(Newthinking Store) and helped promote and publicize my talk. I had a chance to meet some longtime virtual acquaintances from the IxD and IA communities in Berlin, such as Jan Jursa, of IATV and the Berlin IA Cocktail Hour.

The Berlin talk was also full, and again I was blessed with a generous and attentive crowd. More great questions. (We did the whole evening in English. Try as I might to speak slowly, I still probably spoke a bit too fast at times but just about all the German I know is noch ein Bier, bitte so it's just as well.)

One interesting difference between the two groups is that the folks in Berlin asked me more process questions: How was the social design project organized? How did the wiki figure into the writing of the book? What's an unbook? and so on. The questions in London tended to be more about the efficacy of design patterns in general and the application of social design patterns.

At both sessions, certain attendees had reached out to me in advance over Twitter and proposed questions that they had a chance to ask at the events. In London and again in Berlin I was asked the perennial question about whether the use of design patterns stifles innovation. My traditional answer, "No. Now shut up and do your wireframes!" got a laugh in both settings as well. (My real answer: "Not if they are applied as guidelines and with sensitivity to context.")

One other curious difference between the two events was that the audience in London had nearly perfect gender balance, whereas the one in Berlin was, by my estimate, about 90% male. I'd like to learn more about what the differences are between the web design and development communities in the two cities that might account for that variance.

I'd like to thank YDN for sponsoring the trip, and O'Reilly Media for providing logistical support (and some copies of the book to give away as rewards for great questions). Interested folks can see my slides on Slideshare:

Several attendees in London took great notes of my talk and published them on their blogs or personal websites, including Jeff Van Campen, Suw Charman-Anderson, Michael Mahemoff, and O'Reilly's Craig Smith.

Also, this may be as good a place as any to share my upcoming speaking schedule over the next few months:

• Next week Erin Malone and I will be playing our Social Mania game at Interaction 10 in Savannah, Georgia.
• February 23 I'll be speaking at the Bay Area Application Developers Adobe User Group's monthly meeting.
• At Ignite SF I'll do a five-minute 20-slide version of "Designing for Play."
• I'll be signing books (and talking about hacking the ukulele fretboard) at South by Southwest in Austin in mid-March.
• Mar 23 I'll be speaking in San Diego on the Web App Masters Tour.
• May 3 I'll be speaking on the topic of "Designing for Play" at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco.
• May 19-21 I'll be up in Portland for Web Visions with my colleague, YDN evangelist Tom Hughes-Croucher. He'll be presenting Let's Run Javascript Everywhere on the phenomenom of server-side javascript. I'm presenting ideas on Designing for Play. Also, Erin Malone and I will be running our Designing Social Interfaces workshop, and Erin will be presenting her Go with the Flow talk.
• And on June 9-11 I'll be back in London, presenting on Designing for Play and running a Design Social Interfaces workshop at @media, along with Tom H-C, who'll be presenting an Intro to Server-side Javascript.

Image credit: Jeff Van Campen

Christian Crumlish
Pattern Detective
design.yahoo.com

Posted at 4:46 PM | Comments (0) | Permalink

December 13, 2009

Presence, the new social pattern category

We just published two new social patterns in a new category, called Presence (under People), in the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library. The two patterns are Availability and Updates.

The Design Pattern Library is a collection of guidelines for the design of online interactions that can aid decision-making and guide the work of web developers and designers.

I've been studying the concept of "Presence" (often meaning remote presence - telepresences - or digitally mediated partial presence) for about five years now, with an eye toward a possible unbook on the subject some day, and I was able to flesh out a handful of presence patterns for the social patterns project and Yahoo! Press book.

These two patterns emerged from that process and carry within them the work of many Yahoos. The Availability pattern is derived from the work of ex-Yahoo Matte Scheinker and the Messenger team, and the Updates pattern leans heavily on the work of Barry Crane and the Vitality platform team.

It's not always easy pairing social patterns with useful code examples or resources but with Updates I'm excited that we're able to offer crosslinks to three relevant Yahoo! APIs (Updates, Meme, and MyBlogLog) and an emerging open Atom extension (Activity Streams).

Likewise, for Availability we've got a code link to the Yahoo! Status API.

We always hope for feedback on patterns, which you can supply here on this blog post or in the forums for the various pattern categories (in this case, social patterns).

Christian Crumlish
Pattern Recognizer

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October 4, 2009

Designing Social Interfaces - from Yahoo! Press and your friends at the Pattern Library

At Yahoo!, we work hard to make the Internet fun and easy for millions of users a day, so naturally over time we've learned a lot about how to keep sites up and running, how to optimize the code, and how to provide great user experiences under industrial-strength circumstances.

We also like to share the things we've learned, which is one reason why we share design patterns, code libraries, performance tips, and more. It's a big reason for Yahoo! Press, our publishing partnership with O'Reilly Media, where Yahoo! authors share technology expertise with readers of books.

This week, we published the newest Yahoo! Press title, my own Designing Social Interfaces, co-authored with Erin Malone, in which we share many of the hard-won lessons we've learned about building, launching, and maintaining social experiences on the web.

Meanwhile, you may have noticed that our famous Yahoo.com home page recently opened up to third-party developers based on our open Yahoo! Application Platform. Besides providing developers with the opportunity to delight our millions of users, we are also making available methods for hooking into our social directory, so that publishers and app developers can enable sharing, activity-stream updates, invitations, and more.

You can think of "Designing Social Interfaces" as a resource to consult if you're building or designing apps for people to interact with, a handbook that codifies and shares best practices for social web design. Convenient, eh? The book draws from the body of social design patterns we've been publishing in our pattern library and we hope it proves useful to the wider web design and developer community.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, that vividly colored bird on the book cover is a King Bird of Paradise.

Christian Crumlish
Yahoo! Developer Network
Pattern Recognizer
@mediajunkie

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August 20, 2009

Design Patterns, Now More Open and Social

I am delighted to be able to announce today that we are relaunching the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library with ten new patterns, a reorganized category-structure, cleaner URLs for easier bookmarking, and much, much more.

OK, maybe just a little bit more. The ten newest patterns are all in the Social category, and they're just the tip of the iceberg of a major set of patterns emerging from the Social Design Patterns project I've been working on for more than two years. (A Yahoo! Press book on the same topic is coming from O'Reilly in September.)

We've got more rich interaction patterns on their way as well. Perhaps more important than our current pattern pipeline is that we are moving to a much more open pattern review and revision process: We've added a new rating level for patterns called "Beta," and we will use it to publish unfinished patterns and request comments on them from the larger community. The accordion pattern will be the first guinea pig for this process, as we already published a survey through the YUI blog to solicit community input.

We've built out more forums and integrated them more tightly with the relevant pattern categories, and we've added Buzz and Delicious buttons and links to each pattern to enable easier saving, sharing, and favoriting (and to give us more insight into the most useful and popular patterns).

In reorganizing the site navigation we've built up the sections that complement the pattern collection itself with information about the library, about patterns in general, and about peer libraries and related resources.

Finally, we've got three new versions of the stencil kit available now (Fireworks, Axure, and 8 Shapes Unify) and we're prioritizing requests from the community for future versions of the kit.

Enjoy, let us know what you think, and subscribe to this blog feed for updates.

Christian Crumlish
Pattern Recognizer
Twitter: @mediajunkie

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May 14, 2009

Come Hack Some Vocabularies at the Yahoo! Sunnyvale VoCamp

We are pleased to announce that on June 18-19, Yahoo! is sponsoring our first VoCamp event at our main campus in Sunnyvale, CA.

What is VoCamp? As the name indicates, VoCamp is influenced by BarCamp, although VoCamp's emphasis is tilted towards hands-on technical work and practical output. VoCamp provides a two day forum for vocabulary creation and discussions on the management of the Semantic Web. Unlike Semantic Web meetups which typically take just a few hours and focus on a single presentation, the VoCamp format is open and provides time to:

• talk about current issues with vocabularies and semantic interoperability
• work in small groups on a wide variety of problems
• get some real ontology hacking done

With both Yahoo! and now Google committed to supporting structured markup, it's never been a better time to come on in and help shape the future of the Semantic Web. And of course, if you have any direct feedback about how we're dealing with structured data, you'll have our ear. If you're in the Bay Area this June, please sign up on the VoCampSunnyvale2009 wiki page. Space is limited, but we will try to expand if necessary. The event is right after SemTech San Jose, so you won't have far to travel. Best of all, it's free!

Evan Goer
Yahoo! SearchMonkey Team

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January 31, 2009

Where in the world is Yahoo!'s pattern detective?

It's that time of the year again, the spring conference season, and I've got a full schedule of appearances on tap for the next few months. Here's a quick rundown:

When?	Where?
February 5-8 (that's next week!)	Vancouver: At Interaction 09, I'll be teaching a design patterns workshop with fellow Yahoo Lucas Pettinati and former Yahoo (and founder of the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library) Erin Malone from Tangible UX. This is the shorter, half-day version of our workshop. It's not too late to sign up!
March 2-4	Dallas: At the 18th conference of JA-SIG (an organization of open source communities working in higher education), I'll be giving a keynote called User Experience is Everybody's Business. It's at 8:30 am on Tuesday, so don't stay out too late Monday night if you want to catch it.
March 18-22	Memphis: At the IA Summit, I'll be teaching two workshops and giving a presentation. On Wednesday, March 18, Lucas, Erin and I will be teaching our full-day patterns workshop. People seemed to really like it last year and we've only made it better. On Thursday, March 19, I'm teaching an updated version of the architecture of social websites workshop I did last year with Christina Wodtke from LinkedIn and Joshua Porter from Bokardo. This year Yahoo social platform designer Bryce Glass (and co-author of the upcoming Designing Web 2.0 Reputation Systems from Yahoo! Press) will be joining us. At some point during the conference proper (final schedule not determined yet), Erin and I will be giving a talk on "Designing Social Interfaces: Principles, Best Practices and Patterns for Designing the Social Web" (essentially the topic of our book and wiki).
March 31	San Francisco: At the Web 2.0 Expo, Erin and I will be teaching a workshop called (surprise), Designing Social Interfaces: Principles, Best Practices and Patterns for Designing the Social Web on 9:00 am Tuesday.
May 12	New York. At the Enterprise Search Summit, I'll be moderating a panel on Emergent Social Search Experiences, featuring Rob Spiro from the Mechanical Zoo, Susan Chun from Steve.Museum, and Christina Wodtke from LinkedIn.

Who?
Christian Crumlish
Pattern Detective
Yahoo! Developer Network

Posted at 10:46 AM | Comments (1) | Permalink

June 2, 2008

Yahoo! Design Stencil Kit v1.0

Yahoo! this week released a design stencil kit to help designers quickly create mockups for specifications and user testing. Stencil objects have specific meaning and can be incorporated into a design to symbolize a specific kind of module, interaction, or even aesthetic.

These design stencils complement the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library by providing tangible objects that manifest the essence of specific design patterns. The stencil kit also contains links to YUI components and Design Pattern Library entries that help bring depth and tactical execution to designs.

Stencils kits are available for OmniGraffle, Visio (XML), Adobe Illustrator (PDF and SVG), and Adobe Photoshop (PNG) and cover the following topics:

• Ad Units
• Calendars
• Carousels
• Charts and Tables
• UI Controls
• Form Elements
• Grids
• Menus and Buttons
• Mobile - General
• Mobile - iPhone
• Navigation and Pagination
• OS Elements
• Placeholder Text
• Screen Resolutions
• Tabs
• Windows and Containers

To use a design stencil, download the stencil kit compatible with your design application, launch your design application, and start adding stencil objects to your projects. Adobe Illustrator, OmniGraffle, and Visio users can ungroup stencil objects to customize and manipulate size, layout, and aesthetics.

We'll continue updating these collections as we release new patterns and the YUI team releases new versions of their code library. We encourage your feedback regarding these stencils as well as ideas for new ones!

Lucas Pettinati
Principal Interaction Designer

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May 11, 2008

Grasping Social Patterns

Back in April, I gave a five-minute talk to a barful of Web 2.0 conference attendees in San Francisco. An audience member recorded me, and posted it to YouTube:

The event was Ignite at O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Expo last month. This was the most recent in a series of slideshow “slams” that Brady Forrest has been putting on all around the country, and the second one held at Jamie Zawinski’s DNA Lounge in San Francisco (the first was last fall).

The format is inspired by pecha kucha. Each speaker is limited to 20 slides and five minutes. The slides advance automatically each 15 seconds. Each speaker is encouraged to tell a roomful of geeks how to do something.

The tight strictures of the format force the speaker to get to the point right away and pack as much information as possible into the allotted time. I’ll be honest: it was a bit intimidating.

The format itself turned out to be exhilarating, bringing out great performances from a number of the speakers, notably Kathy Sierra (how to make your users kick ass), Annalee Newitz (why giant monsters rule), and Lane Becker (the gruesome physical consequences of running a marathon).

I discussed some of the social design patterns (and antipatterns) that I’ve been gathering as curator of the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library. You can hear the whole talk, including facetious arena-rock shout-out at the beginning, synched up with the slides (which are harder to read in the video), by watching this slidecast:

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Christian Crumlish
Pattern Detective

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