dans.blog

I came across a couple of sites this morning that show off examples of existing UI design patterns that I believe will be useful to all developers. While there's always room to improve, many of the design problems we run into while developing applications can be solved with existing design patterns. The links below are good resources for showing existing patterns, why they're useful and examples of when to use them.

• UI Patterns - User Interface Design Pattern Library
  This is a community based site where users can suggest new patterns and comment on the existing examples. Many of the examples have screenshots of multiple implementations of the same concept, so this can be a good way to spark ideas on how to solve a problem you're facing.
• Designing Interfaces - Patterns for Effective Interaction Design
  This is a support site for the O'Reilly book Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design. There's a lot of really good examples of design patterns and is extremely useful even if you don't own the book (although this looks like a good book for reference library.)
• Yahoo! Developer Network - Design Pattern Library
  One thing I like about this site there's videos to full illustrate the pattern in action (just click on the "Play" button in the screenshots.) While this is a great companion guide if you use the Yahoo! UI Library, you don't need to be using the library for this site to provide value.
• Welie.com - Patterns in Interaction Design
  This site contains more corner case issues and is a little more comprehensive in the types of patterns they illustrate.

I'm working on laying a "dashboard" page where we need to display lots of various information, but in as small a viewport as possible (our goal is to try to avoid scrolling.) I'm using this sites to give me some ideas of ways to implement various solutions.

I'd highly recommend everyone just spend some time looking through the sites today and see what kind of creativity it sparks.

Posted by Dan on Nov 5, 2008 @ 10:08 AM

Windows 7 is introducing a new feature called "Aero Shake." The concept is you simply drag and "shake" a window's title bar and all background windows will either be minimized or restored (based on their current status.) Here's a YouTube video of the feature in action:

While this feature looks cool, I'm wonder how useful it really will be and how intuitive it will be to the user. Since I tend to run most windows maximized, I'm not sure if this will provide much value to me.

Do you see this as be a good or bad UI design pattern?

Posted by Dan on Nov 5, 2008 @ 9:30 AM