Patterns
Information & Interaction Design
17 Aug 2026
Week TEN
DESIGN PATTERNS AGAIN
Design Patterns, Why?
- I’ve already told you I don’t believe in the Design Patterns Bunny …
- So, why an entire lecture devoted to Design Patterns?
- The reason is that Tidwell et al. (2020) has come up with a rationale that may work
- Tidwell et al. (2020) catalogs an exhaustive set of interaction design patterns
- Organizing your thinking this way may help—let’s try it
Categories
- Cognition and Behavior Related to Interface Design, p 11
- Information Architecture Patterns, p 39, AASI
- Navigation Design Patterns, p 142, catLovers
- Screen Layout Patterns, p 226, DLSS
- Mobile Interface Patterns, p 305, ETG
- List Patterns, p 340, JGRH CO
- Action Patterns, p 383, Monkey Business
- Complex Data Patterns, p 446, The Latte Lab
- Forms Patterns, p 476, UX Girliez
Cognition and behavior patterns
- safe exploration
- instant gratification
- satisficing
- changes in midstream
- deferred choices
- incremental construction
- habituation
- microbreaks
- spatial memory
- prospective memory
- streamlined repetition
- keyboard only
- social media, social proof, and collaboration
Note on these patterns
These cognitive patterns differ from all the patterns in the rest of the book. The patterns you’re going to be surveying are prescriptions for interface elements. These are human cognition and behavior patterns. Let’s look at an example.
Safe exploration
“Let me explore without getting lost or getting into trouble.”
How to support safe exploration?
- Multilevel undo (that’s an action pattern for anyone choosing action patterns when we break into groups to study these)
- Predictable back button (no back button hijacking or interstitials …)
Another example: Satisficing
- portmanteau of satisfying and sufficing, coined by Herbert Simon in 1957
- used in psychology and economics to describe people accepting the first “good enough” solution to a problem
- thinking about an optimal solution represents additional work and there’s a tradeoff
Supporting satisficing
- calls to action
- short labels
- use layout to communicate meaning
- escape hatches
- reduce visual complexity, e.g., with hierarchy
Your part
- Choose one of the pattern categories from Tidwell et al. (2020)
- Make a few Google Slide slides as a group, including a title (the chosen category) with your names
- Give us a feel of your category of patterns, along with a few examples
- Merge what you’ve done into the class slideshow, which Dhruvi will share
- One person from each group pastes in the group’s slides
- You present them on Wednesday
Why present?
According to Edgar Dale, you remember:
- 10% of what you read
- 20% of what you hear
- 30% of what you see
- 50% of what you see and hear
- 70% of what you discuss
- 80% of what you experience
- 95% of what you teach
END
References
Nielsen, Jakob. 1994. “Enhancing the Explanatory Power of Usability Heuristics.” Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’94) (New York, NY, USA), 152–58.
Tidwell, Jenifer, Charles Brewer, and Aynne Valencia. 2020. Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design. Third edition. O’Reilly.
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