The Endeca User Experience team began creating and using an internal UIDPL several years ago to capture and share lessons learned from our work and the experiences of our customers and partners on a wide variety of search and discovery problems and applications. Our ultimate goal was to create this publically accessible and living UIDPL to openly share our ideas and promote community dialogue about how to design and compose great search, analyisis. and discovery experiences.
While several other excellent UI pattern libraries exist, our focus is on defining principled ways to solve common user interface design problems and opportunities related to search, faceted navigation, and information discovery.
Planned Growth of the Library
The library will be a continual work in progress. Based on feedback from the community and what we continue to learn through research and design work, we'll update patterns, publish new ones, and discuss pattern topics and "superpatterns" (organized collections of patterns that work together to address a holistic user goal or problem).
We welcome your comments on patterns and topics and invite you to Contact Us to submit ideas for new patterns, problems that you think we should address, and provide feedback from your own experiences with working on search, faceted navigation, and discovery user interfaces.
Our Approach
Our UI design patterns are derived from a variety of sources including lessons learned on multiple projects, solutions, and products; analysis of hundreds of Endeca implementations; user models describing people's information seeking and discovery behaviors; and direct user research and testing performed both internally and in the external academic community.
In the spirit of promoting dialogue and UI innovation, we will periodically include selected patterns that we believe have a solid rationale but have not yet been directly tested. We'll alert you to those, when we do.
We believe it is important to emphasize that the patterns are offered as proposed sets of design guidelines. They are NOT the only solutions, strict recipes etched in stone, or a substitute for sound human-centered design practices.
In our view, it is essential to select and apply the patterns critically and thoughtfully based on an understanding of the users - their level of knowledge, their discovery scenarios and goals, and their modes of information discovery. For example, some UI patterns work well for the "knowledgeable seeker" but not the "uncertain explorer."
For more information about how to effectively use the patterns, you can download Applying Endeca Search & Discovery UI Design Patterns. (You can also view/listen to a UIE - User Interface Engineering-- Webinar on Leveraging Search and Discovery Patterns for Great Online Experiences that Mark Burrell, Ph.D., VP of User Experience at Endeca, presented with Peter Morville.
Patterns are a useful input into a sound user experience analysis and design process, not a substitute. So please use the patterns and tell us what you think and learn.
