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Companie like Yahoo and Google built their business around web software. Just like any other software company, they tend to have patterns of practices which they utilize over and over again to ensure consistency across platforms and services.

A user tends to feel more comfortable if they use software that they are used to. I was a bit surprised that Yahoo is opening up their UI libraries to the world.

Jeremy D. Zawodny reports on his recent post about the Yahoo Design Pattern Library, the Yahoo UI Library, and the Yahoo User Interface Blog

One of the first books that Charles told me to read was a book written by the inventor of Visual Basic. Visual Basic is one of the most popular programming languages thanks to Microsoft and Alan Cooper. Alan apparently wanted to redo it but Gates pushed him to release it. Thanks to their work ( and thousands of others), we now have things like Visual Studio .NET 2005.

When I worked for BTG in high school, Dr. Temple told me to read the SEI-CMM to get an understanding of all their "official" software development methodology. Until then I had coded for my business using PHP, Bash, Perl without any requirements documents and just worried about getting the job done. The job definately opened up my eyes as to what could be done with a planned action of software development.

"Inmates" is one of those books that causes a paradigm shift in one's mind of how to do things. For me the book changed the way I perceived business and technology because it doesn't necessarily contradict traditional methods to design and develop software, but it forces one to go through a strong interface design phase before delving into construction. Why would you build a house without knowing who is going to live there and what they need?

Inmates has a simple philosophy to Interface Design. Define the Personas. Define their Goals. Work to meet their goals. I have always been a goal and objective oriented person and after reading this book, I have looked at the world of software and especially interfaces from a completely different vista. I'm editing the Executive Summary I wrote when I read the book to a presentable form. It'll be here when I'm finished.