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Design patterns, the big picture, Part 3: Beyond software design patterns
Use patterns to improve interaction design, enterprise architecture, software methodology, and more
Page 2 of 5
In the mid-1980s, human-computer interaction pioneers Bill Moggridge and Bill Verplank coined the term interaction design. Ten years later, other designers rediscovered this term and started to use it.
In 1999, Web consultant Jenifer Tidwell presented the first substantial set of interaction design patterns via her Common Ground collection. Since then, she has written Designing Interfaces, which presents new and revised patterns.
More interaction design pattern libraries have since emerged. The Yahoo! Design Pattern Library currently offers 59 user interface patterns. Android Patterns is a pattern repository for designing Android mobile apps.
Interaction design patterns in the real (and virtual) world
Tidwell presents an extensive catalog of interaction design patterns on her website. Most of her patterns are documented in terms of examples, context, problem, forces (tradeoffs being considered), solution, and (often) a resulting context. The Narrative pattern presented in Figure 1 is a good example (courtesy of Jenifer Tidwell).
Figure 1. Documenting the Narrative pattern (click to enlarge)
Patterns can be combined to solve particular design problems. Figure 2 shows an example where several interaction design patterns are combined in a traditional telephone interface, as shown in Figure 2 (courtesy of Jenifer Tidwell).
Figure 2. Applying patterns to a telephone interface (click to enlarge)
Martijn van Welie has collected many examples of interaction design patterns used by web designers. You are likely familiar with the Breadcrumbs pattern, which helps website visitors know where they are in a site hierarchy, and also makes it easier for them to navigate back to higher levels.
Figure 3. The Breadcrumbs pattern on IBM developerWorks (click to enlarge)
The breadcrumb bar in the above design is typical. It presents a path that shows the location of the current page in the total
page hierarchy. Each hierarchy level is labeled and behaves as a link to that level. The current page is marked in some way
to give feedback about where the user is currently located and should not be presented as a link. Note that in Figure 3 the
> symbol is used to separate breadcrumbs.
Microsoft's Windows 7 Explorer program presents another example of the Breadcrumbs pattern. While navigating the filesystem, the breadcrumbs control located at the top of the window presents the path to the current folder. Each folder in this chain is presented as a button that you can click in order to examine the folder's contents. You can also click on any of the parent folder buttons, as shown in Figure 4.
Figure 4. Breadcrumbs in Windows 7's Explorer program (click to enlarge)
Architectural patterns
Architectural patterns have much in common with software design patterns but are broader in scope. Whereas software design patterns address issues at the source code level, architectural patterns address them at the higher level of software architecture. Issues addressed by architectural patterns include hardware performance limitations, high availability and scalability, and business risk minimization. Architectural patterns come in many flavors and are often best learned by studying an implementation example. The patterns below are further discussed in the linked JavaWorld articles and case studies:
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Resources
- Read the earlier articles in this series: Part 1 is an overview of design patterns, including their history and classification; Part 2 is a fresh look at the Gang of Four patterns, especially Strategy and Visitor.
- "Using Patterns in Architecture to Reduce Risk" (Peter Jarman, IASA.org) is an excellent, in-depth survey of architectural patterns.
- See "Introduction to Software Engineering/Architecture/Design Patterns" for an overview of pattern types used in software architecture.
- See the SOA Patterns page for an extensive listing of SOA patterns. Also see "Lean SOA with Java EE 6" (Adam Bien, JavaWorld, April 2009).
- Architectural patterns are often combined. In "Event-driven services in SOA" (JavaWorld, January 2005) Jeff Hanson offers a guided tour of Mule's architecture, demonstrating how the ESB messaging framework combines event-driven and service-oriented architectures.
- "Distributed transactions in Spring, with and without XA" (Dave Syer, JavaWorld, January 2009) presents seven transaction-processing patterns for Spring applications.
- "The ESB Architectural Pattern" (IBM ISV and Developer Relations Group) and "Implementing the Enterprise Service Bus Pattern to Expose Database Backed Services" (Lucas Jellema, Oracle Technology Network, December 2011) describe the ESB. pattern in detail.
- See Organizational Patterns For Software Architecture for more organizational pattern examples.
- See "What Are the Five Organizational Patterns for Public Speaking?" ( Michael Brent, ehow.com) to learn more about patterns for public speaking.