Enterprise flight series: How will you [pattern]-fly?
Business.
Visiting family.
Vacation.
I’m goin’ to Disneyland!
All are valid reasons to fly, but each may suggest different flight routes and patterns depending on the purpose. For example, when flying for business, you usually want a direct flight with the shortest flight path from point A to point B. When flying for leisure, on the other hand, more lax flight routes are completely acceptable.
The same goes with using a pattern library to solve UX problems in an enterprise application. As is the case with flying, the way you would use the library depends on the type of design problem you are trying to solve. Just like you wouldn’t book a meandering flight when you need to be at an important meeting tomorrow in NYC, you also wouldn’t use a complex series of patterns to solve a straightforward use case.
How will you fly?
PatternFly has some great components in its library and provides a large set of tools to help developers and designers solve UX problems. But these design issues are many and varied. Sometimes one component fixes a problem, and sometimes there isn’t a single component to fix the issue of the day — that’s when things get interesting.
Whether you’re a designer or a developer, you come across design and implementation challenges every day, and a pattern library like PatternFly can help to solve those issues. Your route to success depends on the challenges you face. Given this, when you face your next challenge, how will you fly?
Enterprise flight series
In this 3-part “Enterprise flight series,” we share our experiences using PatternFly in an enterprise open source product (in our case, it’s Red Hat OpenShift—a platform that helps administrators and developers easily manage and deploy container applications).
In the articles below, we cover three different cases of building features for the OpenShift console user interface (UI) using PatternFly:
Flight #1: Charter flight—Now boarding!—Search page redesign
Sometimes, design and development is like a charter flight. Unplanned complications can occur when using PatternFly components out of the box. But at the end of the day, the resulting teamwork and creative solutions make the final product that much better.
Flight #2: Non-stop, one-way flight—Now boarding!— Updating catalog components
Layovers aren’t for everyone. Similar to a non-stop flight, a one-way catalog tile conversion can help you create an amazing product experience with PatternFly.
Flight #3: Multi-city flight — Now boarding!—Building a notification center
Every now and again, getting to your final destination means multiple layovers — just like getting to your final product involves multiple PatternFly components.
Have a UX story of your own? Send your ideas our way. More writers and fresh perspectives can only make PatternFly’s Medium publication stronger.
