Chris Heuer's Insytes

In another significant move pointing to the deep smarts resident at Yahoo!, Yahoo! has opened up its Design Patterns and User Interface Libraries. Whenever Nate has his head down for 14 hours each day over several weeks, we know something cool is going to come from it, but this is even bigger than I could have imagined (and I have a pretty big imagination).

So why is this such a big deal? In simple terms, it means you can now officially leverage all the years and millions upon millions of dollars of Yahoo! research that has gone into developing highly usable web sites, using highly interactive design elements – without having to try to hack it or reverse engineer it, without fear of reprisal or that guilty inner conscience. From what I understand in my brief conversation with Nate about this announcement – it makes including rich, Web 2.0 styled AJAX interface elements as easy as dropping in one line of code – the ultimate of ultimate’s in open API. Better still, they are also publishing detailed documentation in addition to blogging about some of the reasons they made their design choices and what they are thinking.

Ultimately, this also means that their expertise will grow even deeper as they can now engage in open discussions with the Information Architecture, User Experience and Human Computer Interaction communities about their choices. Of course, it also means that my web sites, and many others out there, will get to test some of their insights in new ways, further enhancing the core of the knowledge that is originally presented.

Kudos to Nate and the rest of the Yahoo! team who worked on this!.

More on this from WebBreakStuff and O’Reilly.

Technorati Tags: DUX, HCI, ajax, UI, usability, Web2.0, Web2.1, Yahoo