UI patterns

So I've come back quasi-full circle, finding myself thinking of Wx-enabled smart widgets based on the wftk (seriously, it's like it's 2002 again), and last night after the laptop was off, I scribbled down the following note:

Basic mail UI against repo. Define mail-like queues as a thing.

The first sentence is a UI pattern (basic mail reader, with groups, then messages, then a document view for the mail itself), and the second is the data pattern it presents to the user (the concept of a message queue, possibly with threads, certainly with some kind of topic grouping).

This kind of pattern-based "architectural" programming could and should be carried down to the lowest possible levels of programming. That's a semantic mode of conceptualizing software.

Anyway, so I looked up "UI patterns", thinking that would get me that Yahoo effort (YUI, already noted elsewhere on this blog) - but instead it turned up UI-patterns.com, a short-lived effort by Danish web developer Anders Toxboe, an attempt to develop a UI pattern gallery/database/article focus site that seems to have gone on for 2010 and 2011 and stopped. Plenty of spam in the comments sections, but otherwise a ghost town.  Too bad, because it's pretty much what I'd like to start from in this attempt to come up with a language of UI pattern design.

Some good grist for the mill, anyway.

Filed under UI design, patterns, and architectural patterns, because I suspect the UI design has to be based on some conceptualization of the data that would be reflected in the system architecture.

The Machine Zone

Bad user-experience patterns: the Machine Zone. This is the late-night high-channel surf, the one-more-pic-on-Facebook that you zone into for hours instead of sleeping. Great for impressions, and if your metric is stickiness, you might think you're giving your users what they want.

Are you?

Filed under UI design with a little trepidation, because "user experience" is really more something for the purpose of an app, not its implementation.

UX/UI design on HNN

HNN has a great ask-me post on UX/UI design.  I know it comes up often, but one of these days I really need to pay more attention to it.

User interface design

A slideshow on designing better user interfaces.

Sketching UI

Interesting article on designing UIs on, you know, paper.

YUI

OK, so Yahoo! has a UI library, YUI, for writing AJAX applications. Which I kind of knew, but ... really it would be nice to come up with a Rosetta stone for all the myriad ways of cooking a UI.

Article: Don't Design like a Programmer

Some excellent UI design tips that highlight the differences in thought between the UI designer and the programmer. tl;dr: think of UI in terms of the tasks your user is performing, not in terms of the underlying data structures you've built to support those tasks.

UI design

An excellent list of ten considerations for UI design. Again: we oughta have a semantic domain for this. Patterns. Boilerplate. Macros. The works.

Why Johnny can't build UI

A thoughtful post.