IssueRaiser

Design patterns are excellent at creating the illusion of organisation.

Design patterns are excellent at creating the illusion of organisation. I recently had to modify someone else's Mac app. On the surface it looked like a textbook example of successful use of design patterns. Everything was highly modular, functions were simple, there was clear separation of concerns, controllers and views were distinct, and so on. Problem was, the key features were still baked in and hard to modify. So while it looked modular, it wasn't - the affordances were fixed and there was no way to generalise them without pulling apart at least a couple of levels. IMO it's not abstract organisation that matters. Organisation is only good if it makes it easier to achieve clearly-defined goals and benefits. You need to know what the goals are, and make some guesses about what they might be in the future. Otherwise you're just putting stuff in layers and boxes and drawing arrows everywhere for no good reason.

Posted by TheOtherHobbes on Jun 22, 2015, 3:32 PM

Tags

Related issues

Raise real-world problems, find people facing the same issue, and discuss solutions.6,000 issues0 comments

ux (SaaS)

Design patterns are excellent at creating the illusion of organisation.

TheOtherHobbesJun 22, 2015, 3:32 PM

Design patterns are excellent at creating the illusion of organisation. I recently had to modify someone else's Mac app. On the surface it looked like a textbook example of successful use of design patterns. Everything was highly modular, functions were simple, there was clear separation of concerns, controllers and views were distinct, and so on. Problem was, the key features were still baked in and hard to modify. So while it looked modular, it wasn't - the affordances were fixed and there was no way to generalise them without pulling apart at least a couple of levels. IMO it's not abstract organisation that matters. Organisation is only good if it makes it easier to achieve clearly-defined goals and benefits. You need to know what the goals are, and make some guesses about what they might be in the future. Otherwise you're just putting stuff in layers and boxes and drawing arrows everywhere for no good reason.

Comments (0)

No comments yet. Start the discussion.

Comment on this issue