Last week, while Craig was in Aspen, Jason Winters, myself, and over a dozen Salesforce.com colleagues were in Toronto, Canada at the Agile2008 Conference. Jason and I were there to present some of our process innovations around the agile, and rapid, production of an interaction design Pattern Library. Don't know what we mean by "Pattern Library"?  To quote wikipedia:

"In interaction design/HCI, an interaction design (ID) pattern is a general repeatable solution to a commonly-occurring usability or accessibility problem in interface design or interaction design."

Essentially, a library is a collection of documents designed to help you create usable and consistent software.

Our session was titled "Postcard Patterns: An Agile Pattern Creation Process". Traditionally, creating and maintaining a pattern library has been a daunting task requiring extensive resources and, sometimes, dedicated full-time employees.

In keeping with our development team’s agile transformation we revisited the process and invented Postcard Patterns – simple, visual documents that allow us to effectively drive consensus across teams with a lean communication tool. In contrast to our previous pace of 2 patterns in six months, we recently produced 43 patterns in less than three months.

Here's an example of one of our patterns.

For the session, we had a fantastic group of 25 attendees who made the session entertaining, enlightening and educational. The main thing we learned? Most User Experience teams, when taking on the challenge of documenting their interaction design patterns, encounter the same problems we did.

If you'd like to see our presentation, or those from my Salesforce.com colleagues and the rest of the Agile conference, check out slideshare.

Do you have any experience creating an interface design pattern library? Have any tips you'd like to share? Let us know!