Last updated August 6, 2021 by Cherie Chen
Most of the time when you join a UX team, it's pretty natural that you start browsing through all the documentation and rapidly getting yourself familiar with your team's design patterns. Have you ever been curious about how patterns are established in the first place, and how they evolve as the business grows?
I rarely thought about these questions when I first joined the Microsoft Azure UX team. It's not until I started to lead the Azure patterns initiative in January 2021, I'm opened up to lots of behind-the-scenes stories.
A lot of great articles talk about the step-by-step execution of building design patterns thoroughly. The value of design patterns to the business and to the internal team is rarely questioned. Before getting heads-down to build and reaching pixel-perfect in Figma, it's worthwhile to take a pause, zoom out, understand the broader contexts of building design patterns.
The concept of a pattern originated from the field of architecture. As Christopher Alexander wrote in his book A Pattern Language: "Each pattern describes a problem that occurs over and over again in our environment, and then describes the core of the solution to that problem, in such a way that you can use this solution a million times over, without ever doing it the same way twice." Patterns are defined as reusable solutions to widespread problems. This concept started to emerge in the computer science and software development field around the 90s.
So how do patterns benefit us, the digital residents? Herbert Simon once wrote: “... a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.” In the current era where information is easily overwhelming to everyone, we all need intuitive and native product experiences and get the tasks done effortlessly.
As reusable solutions, we get familiar with patterns as we engage more. They perfectly solve the complexity, reduce the learning curve, and eventually help solve the problems through a system-thinking approach.