Okay you may think I over-stated things slightly when I predicted that "in 5 years' time the major online retailers will have defined what best practice means to them using design patterns!" (see yesterday's newsletter).

But I do believe that design patterns are going to be big and I'd like to learn other peoples' views before I go any further out on a limb!

Firstly, what are they? A design pattern is a way of describing the principles underlying a problem that occurs frequently in a specific context. Sorry if this is a bit abstract but the keywords here are important. Christopher Alexander, the inventor of design patterns, was frustrated that architects seemed to keep on re-inventing the wheel - the same problems kept cropping up in almost identical contexts, yet the solutions to these problems often repeated the same mistakes. 

Now, how familiar is this in e-commerce, e-marketing, and e-everything-else?

So, Alexander set out to find ways of capturing good practice in a way that identified when it was good practice (context), what it was good for (problem) yet without inhibiting the creativity of architects to develop innovative solutions (principles - 'cos architects are big on this creativity stuff!). The result was design patterns.

Secondly, how can design patterns be used?  They're still used in architecture, they're used lots in software design and, recently, they've just hit the big time in user interface design. In February this year Yahoo! started to publish the design patterns they use in the design of all their web properties. The design patterns themselves can be found here.
  
In their design pattern for breadcrumbs, for example, they describe principles for labelling and hyperlinking, and then explain the rationale behind these principles and explore accessibility considerations. They also show an example of it in practice, and have a blog article expanding slightly on the pattern itself with 11 comments.

This then, is a distillation of what Yahoo! has learned about using breadcrumbs on a web site. It won't please all of the people all of the time but for someone wanting a quick checklist of things to think about when designing a breadcrumb, I couldn't point to a better, more concise resource.

What about this design-patterns-set-set-to-take-over-the-world stuff? I think they are a great way of capturing and communicating knowledge about good practice in e-business without specifying the exact solution. I think they are a great way of building communities of practice - someone proposes a design pattern and the rest of the world adds their knowledge and experience so the pattern can be improved. I think they are an excellent way for companies to descibe how they do things differently - by taking generic good practice principles and adding their own distinctive flavour to it (how much more informative would that be than the corporate style guide?). Anyone agree?  More importantly, if you disagree, why?

From my personal point of view, I've written 2 Online Retail reports containing dozens of case studies and recommendations. But how many e-commerce managers, on the cusp of a site re-design,  are going to take the time to read all 140+ pages for inspiration and guidance? Wouldn't it be better if they had topic or issue-based design patterns containing a distillation of the knowledge contained in these reports (and, even better, the collective wisdom of a community like this) about good practice in e-commerce design. I've already started to write some design patterns (incorporating relevant bits of existing design pattern libraries on web design in general and e-commerce specifically). But these design patterns would be a lot stronger and more authorititive if they were a community endeavour.

Anyone want to play?

Mike Baxter
www.saleslogiq.com
Specialists in the online customer experience

I wish you were right saying 'they're used lots in software design'.

Unfortunately, in the course of the work I do testing web sites, it seems to me that the ecommerce sector is quite happily bumbling along without much re-use of patterns in software - as well as in interface design.

A silly example - just the simple task of getting credit card details. The variation across web sites is enormous; the naming of fields (security code has a silly variety of names) - the default values offered.  The software coding - not infrequently do sites complain if you have space between your credit card digits.

Looking at the real software under the bonnet - the only 'patterns' people seem to follow are the silly top-down ones: 'lets upgrade to .Net form asp coz it'll be faster'... then implemented without understanding how .Net differs, end result, a slower site.

We did a survey of the search functions on government web sites for the SOCITM local govt IT folks.  You't think search interfaces would be a pattern by now (errr - just copy google!).  But there was huge variety in implementation - in terms of how multiple words were handled etc. The worst sites, you could crash if you used the right punctuation mark!  Some you could get a 3Mbyte page back if you searched for common words.

I'm still coming out of shock this week, from having discovered that one (high street retailer)'s web site was offering one visitor in 20 a special offer, that it explicitly said were valid only until the end of Novermber 2005...

For 6 months they've been confusing 5% of their visitors...and they can now explain the 'funny' calls to the call centre.

Phew, sorry, Friday rambling...

Anyway, I'd really love to see more thinking going into eCommerce -whether software, UI or whatever.  But it just seems to be a sector that isn't ready for that yet.

Like when I heard a Mktg Mgr say that their new nearly high-six-figure eCommerce platform was up and live, but the web analytics for it won't be ready for another few months... someone pinch me and I'll wake up....

Deri
SciVisum  web site ROI testing

I think what Mike has in mind is that software people are big on reusable code, so that they don't re-invent the wheel every time they sit down to create a piece of software.  

Design patterns seem to me to be the designers equivalent, and I can see that they have huge potential.  

I can give you one design pattern that i see over and over again (including our sites.).  You hit checkout and you get a form that asks if you are a returning user, if so please enter your email and password, otherwise click here to continue.  I see the same design over and over again which is a good thing.

There must be dozens of such situations that a bit of standardisation would not only formalise best-practice and would also help customers a lot in finding their way around.  After all the reason that MS windows is so successful (I believe) is that it imposes a set of design patterns on software developers that makes it so much easier for users to start using unfamiliar applications.

Now a beef.  

A lot of designers want their site to look and work differently to other sites.  Its the 'creative' thing.  So you get scroll bars that don't work like regular scroll bars and radio buttons that look like checkboxes.  Bad bad bad.

Bob

You're right Bob, software people like to reuse code.  But that often means that they want to reuse their own code; whereas can be nervous about 'reuse' of using someone elses code (from outside their team).

Of course, programmers vary hugely - at one end those that would always want to write a module from scratch rather than bring in something 'close enough' from outside - through to those that want to just glue other bits of other peoples code together and enjoy the difficulties of that approach.

(And the open source growth means more folks are trying out whole software modules than 10 years ago)

But to take the example I gave  - the huge variety of words and layout around the simple thing of taking credit card details.  Was it marketing or usability folks who mandated those? Or the creative look/feel guys? Or were the programmers left free with a spec that just said 'credit card page'?

No matter who was responsible at each site, it's clear that we dont seem to have been learning /nicking approaches from each other.  You could imagine that a big name like Amazon would have been the easy model for folks to duplicate.... didn't happen.

Personally, I started my career as a techie, and have been exposed on the way to lots of the best kind of quality management - 'right first time' kind of stuff. So I love the concept + see the value of a standards based approach to all sorts of things.

But when doing say performance testing of user journeys for clients whether the big names or small - there is a huge spread of best practise.

Very often people are shocked by the things uncovered.  So they weren't planned or intended design issues, just the collateral damage of folks feeling too busy or unwilling to use the good practise that is out there to be followed.

Eventually design patterns will be more widely used - I am an optimist too!

Deri

On 12:45:48 13 May 2006 textor wrote:

I think what Mike has in mind is that software people are big on reusable code, so that they don't re-invent the wheel every time they sit down to create a piece of software.  

Design patterns seem to me to be the designers equivalent, and I can see that they have huge potential.  

I can give you one design pattern that i see over and over again (including our sites.).  You hit checkout and you get a form that asks if you are a returning user, if so please enter your email and password, otherwise click here to continue.  I see the same design over and over again which is a good thing.

There must be dozens of such situations that a bit of standardisation would not only formalise best-practice and would also help customers a lot in finding their way around.  After all the reason that MS windows is so successful (I believe) is that it imposes a set of design patterns on software developers that makes it so much easier for users to start using unfamiliar applications.

Now a beef.  

A lot of designers want their site to look and work differently to other sites.  Its the 'creative' thing.  So you get scroll bars that don't work like regular scroll bars and radio buttons that look like checkboxes.  Bad bad bad.

Bob

On 12:45:48 13 May 2006 textor wrote:

I can give you one design pattern that i see over and over again (including our sites.).  You hit checkout and you get a form that asks if you are a returning user, if so please enter your email and password, otherwise click here to continue.  I see the same design over and over again which is a good thing.

Even such a standard log in screen can be fatally sabotaged by design, which is why the idea of patterns, complete with common errors, is so interesting. I recently heard Marty Carroll from Foviance give a talk in which he described a version of this very screen in which the "Forgotten your password" link was right underneath the password entry field and also much more prominent than the "submit" one. People entered the password, hit the wrong link, got the "enter your email and we'll send you your password" screen. Got fed up...

And even with such a standard screen the order switches around. A quick straw poll reveals:

Amazon UK: Email field then "I am a new customer"
John Lewis: Email field then "Yes, I have a password" (default)
Boden: Email field then "Do you have a Boden.co.uk password? Yes"
Lands End: Email field then "I currenly have an account and my password is" (default)

Tim