The Design of Sites: Pattern Group A — Site Genres
Pattern Group A of The Design of Sites — twelve high-level “site genre” patterns (A1-A12), each describing a category of Web site and the design considerations distinctive to it. Unlike the concrete UI patterns in other groups, these patterns are deliberately abstract and heavily cross-reference the lower-level patterns documented elsewhere in this pattern language; a real site typically combines several genres at once.
License: © 2006 Pearson Education / New Riders — all rights reserved, no open license; one of the book’s co-authors is a FuguUX founder, which is the basis for citing it here.
Key points
- Personal E-Commerce (A1) — applying e-commerce fundamentals to a small, individually-run online store, including a cross-channel research finding on how online and offline shopping habits influence each other (see Easy Returns).
- News Mosaics (A2) — the time/form/audience differences between Web news and broadcast/print news, the risk of personalization-driven “Balkanization” of readers, and durable per-story Permalinks as an underused differentiator.
- Community Conference (A3) — the independent policy axes (usage rules, synchronous vs. asynchronous, moderation level, anonymity level, archiving) that separate a healthy online community from a bare message board, plus concrete moderation guidance and the network-effect logic behind community growth.
- Self-Service Government (A4) — replacing red tape and faceless bureaucracy with transparent self-service status and local-agent access, universal-access obligations, and government-specific privacy caution (avoiding persistent tracking that reads as surveillance).
- Nonprofits as Networks of Help (A5) — the four-stakeholder (sponsors/volunteers/staff/beneficiaries) needs table and the network-effect case for connecting them directly rather than serving each in isolation.
- Grassroots Information Sites (A6) — establishing credibility through dating and comprehensiveness, writing for both search engines and readers, curating (not just listing) External Links, and the natural growth path into a community conference.
- Valuable Company Sites (A7) — the 95/5 homepage-space rule, the case against splash screens, and organizing around customer needs rather than internal org structure.
- Educational Forums (A8) — the same multi-stakeholder network-effect pattern applied to schools, and the administrative-efficiency-vs-educational-effectiveness trap.
- Stimulating Arts and Entertainment (A9) — keeping entry pages conventional so that rule-breaking, experimental interaction is confined to exhibits a visitor has deliberately opted into.
- Web Apps That Work (A10) — try-before-you-buy expectations, the plain-HTML-vs-richer-interaction tradeoff, and why Web apps need explicit delay feedback and point-of-need help more than ordinary sites do.
- Enabling Intranets (A11) — role-based personalized views, workflow automation between roles, and why interface consistency compounds in value across an employee’s whole career inside one organization.
- Blogs (A12) — genre flexibility, the individual/group/community operating-model spectrum, the comments tradeoff, and tags/RSS as blog-specific findability tools.
Yahoo! appears as a worked example in Grassroots Information Sites (its link-directory size guideline).