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At the present time, best rules and patts have reached a zenith in popularity and diffusion, thanks to the software community’s efforts to discover, classify and spread knowledge concing all types of rules and patts. Rules and patts are useful elements, but many features remain to be studied if we wish to apply them in a rational manner.The improvement in quality that rules and patts can inject into design is a key issue to be analyzed, so a complete body of empirical knowledge dealing with this is therefore necessary. This paper tackles the question of whether design rules and patts can help to improve the extent to which designs are easy to understand and modify. An empirical study, composed of one experiment and a replica, was conducted with the aim of validating our conjecture. The results suggest that the use of rules and patts affect the understandability and modifiability of the design, as the diagrams with rules and patts are more difficult to understand than non-rule/patt versions and more effort is required to carry out modifications to designs with rules and patts.