Yahoo! Design Pattern Library

Yahoo! has available to developers a pattern library for describing how it deals with certain customer actions. These patterns are interesting for a number of reasons:

• They show how a major internet player deals with customer experience, and the devotion to ensuring a consistent customer experience through all of their sites
  
• The show how they deal with accessibility issues and their devotion to ensuring that their sites are accessible
  
• They provide a template for design patterns which can be used to assist developers and website managers to improve their sites and more importantly the consistency of their customer experience

This last point is extremely pertinent in some cases. Take for example Lloyds TSB Insurance who provide a number of different insurance products to their customers. Compare the look and feel of each of the products and the general customer experience provided by them, and you'll be sure to find that there is a massive inconsistency in there. By using a consistent set of design patterns, this could be easily avoided and the customer experience of the whole site improved drastically.

I for one have already adopted these principles in my work, and have seen a number of equally good applications, not least the Online Retail 2006 benchmark published by eConsultancy