From post-its to design patterns

Design patterns are generally referred to as a way to support developers and help them to reuse proven solutions and solve common design problems while composing patterns to create reusable designs that can be mapped to different platforms. Without this, cross-platform application designers are not properly applying design solutions or taking full benefit of the power of patterns as reuse blocks, resulting in poor performance, poor scalability, and poor usability. Furthermore, the designer may "reinvent the wheel" when attempting to implement the same design for different platforms based on their own understanding of the system application requirements. Design patterns are a vehicle for capturing and reusing good designs while detailing a motivating example on how design patterns can be composed to create a generic application design. In addition, patterns are a suitable means for mapping an application to new platforms while maintaining its intrinsic quality attributes and providing consistency across all platforms. Attempting to define design patterns from a development perspective is a complex task but what about the users? How do we define design patterns from a user experience perspective?

An example may be by talking to the representative user groups, asking specific questions about the product concerned to help identify the user’s motivations and emotional response to the product in question. Following a series of interviews or diary accounts of the user journey, it is then possible to transcribe each individual interview highlighting the motivations (verbs) and the emotions highlighted by each user. In doing so what you will start to see is the emergence of a pattern highlighting common motivations and emotive responses. Carrying out a cluster analysis of the common verbs and emotive references will not only inform the developers of the components required during the early stages of the analysis but more importantly help to build the personas of each representative user group and provide insights to the taxonomy or classifications of information categories required from an interface perspective. This does not need lots of technology or technical understanding just good observation and a pile of post-it notes to help build up a pattern and identify the common elements of the user experience that need to be created or resolved.