Friday, February 6, 2009

User Experience Design Patterns

User Experience has a lot of impact in the overall usage and eventually the success of any software but practically it is one of the most ignored components in any software development activity. The software engineers out there tend to engineer very sophisticated but complex interfaces without keeping in view the overall usage of it. They tend to come up with a geeky look which the end users don’t really understand.

So considering this importance and need, there have been quite a few efforts to establish Design Patterns related with user experience, but the latest one initiated by Infragistics folks outstands all. Infragistics has launched a User Experience Explorer in the name of Quince. It’s a Silverlight based web application (you need Silverlight plug-in for your web browser and its around 4.5 MB installation package). It provides a very interactive environment to explore the different design patterns related to user experience. You can browse them via tags, user actions, free text search etc. Each of these design patterns is elaborated with text and pictorial examples and that too in an interactive way.

Moreover, you can contribute to all this by sharing more examples for an existing pattern or you can even propose a new design pattern that hasn’t already been listed there.

It’s a must see web app; have a look at it in your free time to get some inspirations and food for thought!



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