Lone Gunman

A huge library of inter­ac­tion design pat­terns; from accor­dion nav­i­ga­tion to vir­tual prod­uct display.

[This library is] a ref­er­ence or basic ‘toolkit’ you can use when design­ing user expe­ri­ences. It is no sub­sti­tute for cre­ative design, it sim­ply seeks to describe what we know and have learned about solu­tions you will find abun­dantly on the web and even beyond. Every ‘solu­tion’ described in these pat­terns may suc­ceed in one con­text but may also fail in another. The chal­lenge is to under­stand why and how it depends on ele­ments of the con­text of use. I give you my opin­ion here, but my opin­ion is also sub­ject to new insight

The Yahoo! Design Pat­terns Library is what you could call a series of best prac­tices for web inter­ac­tion design­ers. Of par­tic­u­lar note are the ‘Rep­u­ta­tion’ Solu­tion Pat­terns:

A per­son par­tic­i­pat­ing in a social struc­ture expects to develop a rep­u­ta­tion and hopes for insight into the rep­u­ta­tions of oth­ers, but each designed model of par­tic­i­pa­tion and rep­u­ta­tion embod­ies its own set of biases and incen­tive struc­tures. Bal­anc­ing these forces deter­mines in large mea­sure the suc­cess or fail­ure of a social system.

All released under a Cre­ative Com­mons attri­bu­tion license.