I'd love to hear more about your pattern library, Courtney. On Tue, Jan 6, 2009 at 9:54 AM, Jordan, Courtney <cjor...@bbandt.com> wrote:
> Having just created a design pattern library for my company, I'm pretty > well-versed on these! There are actually two design patterns: accordions > and show/hide panels. Accordions only allow one bar's contents to > display at a time. I'm collaborating with the YUI (http://developer.yahoo.com/yui) team on an accordion pattern and am about to post something to the YUI blog to seek community feedback (coincidentally, this extended thread has covered much of the same ground). At this point, by the rules of an earlier poster I realize I have auto-Godwinized this discussion by mentioning the Y in YUI. I will save my disquisition on "industrial strength ux" for another time and refocus. Anyway, I'm finding that designers tend to be far more prescriptive about defining things like accordions. They don't all agree with your assertion that (paraphrasing) accordions only allow one panel to be shown at a time (and that this is in fact what distinguishes an accordion from a stack of show/hide panels), but many do. Plus they all seem to agree that there is a rule. The front-end engineers, of course, are looking at it not from the point of view of a user, experiencing the interface element and forming a mental model of it based on its behaviors. They look at how it's made and when they abstract that, they say that an accordion is a type of tree. The YUI folks in particular, who serve both an internal front-end engineer audience within Yahoo! as well as a wide developer community at large, *know* that eventually somebody will want an accordion within an accordion with a scrollbar and panels that blink on hover. They don't see themselves as usability cops at the code level. When we release an accordion component, it will likely have some default rules and a great deal of configurable flexibility. At the pattern level, though, we will make recommendations, share competing notions abroad in our communities of practice, and perhaps even say that what makes an accordion is that only one panel opens at a time (which, ironically, is exactly how an actual accordion does not work). ... > If you haven't already, check out welie.com for Martijn van Welie's > great design pattern work or designinginterfaces.com for Jennifer > Tidwell's. > I always do. And the Yahoo design pattern library always links to them when there's an analogous or related pattern in their (and other collections). If I had a good way to do it, I would transclude some of their patterns directly into ours. -xian- -- Christian Crumlish I'm writing a book so please forgive any lag http://designingsocialinterfaces.com ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
