Hello Pattern Tappers,

Please forgive our brief hiatus. We’ve been tied up with other things, namely a small naming challenge with another quality Pattern Library application. That’s not all though! We’ve been working on pulling on our favorite information architect, usabilty freak, and web strategist @emilysmith into our Pattern Tap project in order to capture some good usability testing and see how we can respond in the coming weeks.

A few things that are on the top of our list:

Redesigning
The current design was a great experiment in user interface and interaction. It was inspired heavily by FFFFound, Tumblr, Buamai, and Dropular. While the site has received some great positive responses, it has also received a handful of critical feedback and we’ve seen some serious usability problems. Not to mention, the design simply doesn’t scream Squared Eye style, and well, that’s dang important to us. So, we’re going back to the drawing board, and looking to prototype more quickly and get something fresh out to you in August/September.

Pagination
Our uber cool constant pagination (Tumblr/Twitter style) isn’t appropriate in this instance. It doesn’t work nearly as well as a more traditional pagination. We broke the “pattern” and it was a poor choice. Lesson learned.

Hover States on Images
These have been too intense and in the wrong direction. We found that by darkening the image we were de-emphasizing the image rather than highlighting it. That will be addressed. 

UserSets vs Tags
We’re looking at dropping UserSets in favor of universal and personal tags. It’s a more common and uniform way of thinking and we think it will be more helpful over the long term.  

Education
We’ll be looking at treating the overall vision of Pattern Tap as a true educational resource, and cementing the fact that we are NOT a web gallery for your style inspiration, but rather a design solution archive for specific User Interface Patterns. 

iPhone, iPad, Information Architecture, Ecommerce, Web Applications
At this stage we’ve been focusing on web design solutions, but in the near future, we’ll be addressing a much broader focus one subdomain at a time. We’ll be covering iPhone and iPad design, information architecture design and practices, ecommerce solutions, and web application design solutions.

There’s lots around the corner, so stay tuned, and as always, PLEASE add your insight and feedback at GetSatisfaction.com/PatternTap.

Thanks!

Matthew Smith