[IxDA Discuss] Patterns vs Principles (was good template examples)

[Mike Baxter]

This thread has reminded me just how great it is to be working in a
discipline as rich and multi-layered as design! You start the discussion
assumming a common frame of reference only to discover, as the discussion
progresses that we are actually talking about subtly but significantly
different things.

Jack, you say that 'as a field [we] are too focused
on principles and practices when, as a user, all I need are solutions to
many problems that have already been solved. This industry has thousands of
pages of principles built into checklists and they simply collect dust.

[and suggest] that many design problems do (!) boil down to mundane
engineering (visuals, flow,
HTML) details that high-school kids should not be made to rethink every day
...

Okay, at one level I couldn't agree more. I seem to recall discussions on
this list suggesting that it is not helpful for designers to be inventing
new designs for standard controls - checkboxes and radio buttons, for
example. The best advice, in this case is use the standard control - we
certainly don't need a set of guiding principles.

But coming to Jenifer's (excellent!) patterns (buy the book - Designing
Interfaces!), there are many that describe a set of principles but do not
specify the solution details. Take Global Navigation, for example -
http://designinginterfaces.com/Global_Navigation. Designing a navigation
scheme for an entire site doesn't boil down to mundane engineering details -
it has got to be divorced from its solution details.

A couple of examples that I'm working on (for e-commerce):
The product-specific landing page (the page you arrive at in an e-commerce
site after clicking a Adword link). The pattern for such a page is not
complicated - identify the product (model name/number) and show the product,
price, whether it's in stock, delivery cost, delivery duration and add a buy
button - all above the fold. Reviewing top retail sites in the UK, however,
revealed that most missed one or more of these key details - hence the need
for the pattern.

Even more complex is feature filtering (or guided/facetted navigation) where
customers can 'home-in' on the type of product they are looking for by
selecting its attributes (e.g. a toaster for 2 or 4 slices). This has only
recently moved into mainstream in e-commerce and the mistakes being made are
too numerous to mention here. But by analysing these mistakes and seeing
what imact they have on the online customer experience, we can scope out the
range of anti-patterns to be avoided
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antipattern). A design pattern is a
specification of the principles to be adhered to in order to avoid these
mistakes.

But they do need to be principles! My clients wouldn't thank me for
suggesting that the details of their e-commerce pages should be exactly that
same as all their competitors!

Cheers

Mike Baxter
www.saleslogiq.com