Friday, February 17, 2006
Yahoo UI Blog: Excellent resources for web designers
Yahoo UI Blog posts a rich set of resources for web designers.
Yahoo has released a broad range of tools, design patterns, and Javascript routines for web designers. The background may be found at Yahoo UI Blog. A couple of the introductory posts describe and point to these excellent resources, as well as the resources that inspired the creation of the Yahoo material.
The Design Pattern Library is licensed under a Creative Commons license, giving the community use of these patterns tested under the load of Yahoo’s traffic.
Yahoo describes a pattern library as “. . . an optimal solution to a common problem within a specific context.” Take the example of breadcrumb navigation. The design library breaks that into a problem summary, a solution, and a rationale. All of this leads to a better understanding of the uses of these objects within a site.
This approach also gets around the problem that often comes up during design phase. All of us have our likes and dislikes about structure and usability within a site. By treating the user interface from the viewpoint “what works best in this context,” we can move away from our own biases in design and move towards “what works best in this context.” I’m paraphrasing [ulr=http://www.dontmakemethink.com/]Steve Krug[/url] here, from his book, Don’t Make Me Think.of assessing the best solution for the situation at hand during a design phase.
The Yahoo UI Library is a large library of UI objects licensed under the BSD public license. A large number of JS objects and routines, tested under the traffic generated by Yahoo’s services.
