UXTalk #2: Modèles de design et de UX/ Design & UX Patterns

Last Wednesday’s UXTalk in Montreal brought together around 30 people to discuss the topic of Design & UX Patterns. What I’m starting to like a whole lot about these talks is just how multidisciplinary the folks that come to them are. Web, mobile, gaming, content, strategy and marketing people came by to talk with each other. We got through a lot of questions and I think we came up with some interesting answers. Here are some of the things we discussed:

-          UX Design Patterns, what are they?

-          Where do design patterns come from?

-          How do they help/hinder design processes and innovation?

-          How do they get changed/evolve?

UX Design Patterns, what are they?

Not the same as “User Interface design patterns”, although the latter may certainly be used to construct User Experience (or to speed design and production processes up, more on this coming soon.)

We came to a very clear distinction between “UI patterns” and “UX patterns”. Think of the difference between them as that between a sign up form for a service and the experience that leads a user to sign up for a service, or the difference between saying a room “must have 2 windows”  and saying a room “has to let enough light into it.” See Christopher Alexander (Wikipedia) and http://www.patternlanguage.com/ for much more on pattern theory. We seemed to agree we need both UX and UI design patterns.

Coming next: Where do UI and UX design patterns come from?