User Interface Design Patterns: Introduction

This collection consists of user interface design patterns (interaction patterns) that seems to be recuring problems when trying to make design based on the user’s goals. These design patterns have been analyzed during the past five years by going through hundreds of designs, to give instructions and design examples to the students of design courses at the University of Helsinki, Dept. of Computer Science. In addition, some patterns have been crystallized in customer projects at Interacta Design Oy.

In the first place, I have analyzed the design patterns and created the collection for my User Interfaces II course. In 1998-2002, Karri-Pekka Laakso and Asko Saura have made a considerable effort to analyze design examples and clarify the patterns and they relationships with me.

The collection does not primarily consist of GUI designs of common software, but tries to outline the recuring design problems faced when trying to create good design. Our method to produce good design is to use our Goal-Derived Design (GDD) method that is based on simulation of the user’s goals. The pattern collection does not include all the characteristics of good design we know so far, but only the design knowledge that we have found appropriate to describe as design patterns.

An excellent set of examples and analyses ...