Michael Gaigg: Über UI/UX Design

15 = Quince or a Really Cool Pattern Library

Quince is an online repository of UX patterns. It was developed by Infragistics and released to the public today. It's free and open so that anybody can contribute with their knowledge. Silverlight required!

Yes, Quince is not the first pattern library, there are plenty of other excellent pattern libraries like Yahoo! Design Pattern Library, Open Source Pattern Library, UI-Patterns.com and many more, but it surely is a very comprehensive and good looking one.

What are Patterns?

A pattern is a reusable, best-practices approach used in the design of a solution to a commonly-occuring problem within a specific context. A pattern is not a finished piece of code or design that can be used as is. Rather, it reflects the sum total of a community's knowledge and experience or expertise in a given domain.

I strongly recommend reading the interview about Pattern Languages for Interaction Design with Erin Malone, Christian Crumlish, and Lucas Pettinati.

Social Interface Patterns

Another very interesting approach to patterns is taken by Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone who are currently working on a book for O'Reilly Media.
Check out their Designing Social Interfaces patterns wiki and contribute to their upcoming book. Very interesting approach!

Antipatterns

Antipatterns are common UX mistakes to learn from. Probably the most prominent antipattern is "Click here" also known as "Navigating in a mysterious way". Read a very interesting Antipatterns blog entry by Peter Hornsby.

Controversy

I think there is no doubt that patterns can boost our development process and reduce the amount of work needed to re-invent common elements. Study them and try to enhance on top of them!

Antipatterns on the other side might not be that useful. Even though I agree with Scott Berkun in his line of argumentation about Failure: the secret to success that it is important to learn from one owns mistakes and failures but that might be also overrated like Jason states in Learning from failure is overrated: "There’s a significant difference between “now I know what to do again” and “don’t do that again.” The former being better than the latter."

What do you think? Have I missed something or somebody?

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About Michael Gaigg

Michael Gaigg is a User Interface Expert at ESRI. His expertise includes User-centered Design (UCD), Usability, Accessibility and Section 508, Web Development and Web Design.