A pattern library of architectures

Technical architecture has a mature understanding of architectural patterns. That’s not something we think explicitly about much in IA, but pattens exist regardless. This is an (ironically) unsorted list of patterns I see in use:

• Junk drawer
• Big ball of mud
• Inbox
• Ledger/Data table
• Activity feed
• Thread
• Search within
• Pin board
• Folder
• Recommended content
• Guided tour
• Neighborhood
• Clickable metadata
• Glass door (the way you can see the contents of a module from the learning path)
• Card
• List
• Detail page
• Wizard (?)
• Beads on a string
• Tabletop
  • Nesting doll
  • Bento box
• Landscape
  • Hub and spoke
  • Star (dense interlinking, like wikipedia)
  • Hierarchy
    • Table of contents
• Façade: Create a new thing in front, so nobody has to look at the old
• Strangler: Create a new thing that gradually overtakes the old
• Refactor: Change little pieces of an old thing as you can

Q: What anti-patterns do we have in IA?

• Wizards
• Role-based navigation
• Anything accomplished with an army of interns¹ ⊕ ¹ Andy Fitzgerald’s 2024 Taxonomy Bootcamp talk, “Orchestrating for the Mundane” points out that this solution is a dead giveaway for a “law of medium numbers” problem, where the problem is too big to study exactly and too small to study statistically.

References

Foote, B., & Yoder, J. (1999). Big Ball of Mud. Pattern Languages of Program Design 4. http://www.laputan.org/mud/?ref=coding-horror