The Language Of Attention – A Pattern Approach

Bill Scott describes Yahoo as a tribal platform, particuarly with the acquisition of various API-based services such as Flickr and del.icio.us as part of the Yahoo Developer Network.

Attention needs to be driven by engaging and relevant interactions to create the loyalty neccessary for successful services. The successful interaction patterns Scott outlines include:

  • Immediacy
  • Directness – drag’n’drop, inline editing.
  • Invitational – hover and tooltip invitations to further interaction,
  • Removing boundaries – endless scrolling, in-context expands, hover details.
  • Light footprints – Remembered collections, rating items.
  • Cinematic – slides and fades, self-healing transitions.
  • Rich content – Sharable, bloggable, clonable and findable items.

Alongside the Yahoo Developer Network and UI Library,  the Design Pattern Library is a set of thirteen patterns that attempts to surface a vocabulary and expose solutions for this paradigm of UI components.

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