Pattern Tap

• Constantly updated

• Categorized collections for locating specific types of UI inspiration

• Faceted search through tags for filtering needs

• A Community of highly involved users

• Clean and intuitive design and navigation of its own

Quince

• Collection of old and new patterns

• Categorized collections for locating specific types of UI inspiration

• Alphabetical, tag, and user task related faceted filtering

• Search feature available

• Clean and intuitive design and navigation of its own

• Visualization of UI relationships

• Beautiful liquid layout

• Built with Silverlight

Welie

• Large pattern list

• Screenshot examples

• Filter by need of the user

• Visio tips and tricks, Macros!

• Hasn’t been updated since June 2008

Yahoo!

• Yahoo! provided content

• Categorized collections for locating specific types of UI inspiration

• Faceted navigation style

• Why, why, when, and how certain patterns should be implemented

• Limited examples, Yahoo! specifics provided

• Links to YUI (Yahoo! User Interface Library) for JavaScript code for building mentioned interactions

jQuery

• Smaller collection

• jQuery specific widgets and actions

• Useable live demos

UI Pattern Factory

• Specific to best in practice examples

• Video examples of interactions

• Vote for new patterns to be added to the collection

• Voting involved community, new posts are rare

UI Patterns

• Similar to PatternTap

• Nice screenshot collections for a quick sneak peek

• Footer provides quick breakdown of available design patterns

O’Reilly

• Excerpts from the book

• Touchpoints with What, When, Why, and How

• It’s O’Reilly, good stuff, period

flickr Web Site Group

• Large collection of images

• Images are tagged fairly consistently

• Search for the inspiration you are looking for and get results

• Very little explanation to screenshots provided

flickr Janne L

• Large collection of images from an individual

• Not organized for specific UI feature surfing

• Very little explanation to screenshots provided

CSS Mania

• Large gallery of CSS Designs

• Beautiful interface designs and inspiration on navigation and layout

• Little to no organization, only a monthly gallery filter

• Updated regularly and offers a great RSS feed

• Many similar galleries
  http://www.CSSLeak.com

Visual Complexity

• Large gallery of Data Visualizations

• Fantastic organizational structure

• Faceted search for filtering

• Beautiful examples with great explanation and information on the data shown

• Updated regularly and offers a great RSS feed

Wireframing is a very powerful tool in building the foundation for a website. Wireframes allow your team to visually recognize the interactions between pages and content. There are many different ways of integrating wireframes in to your process and it might be different from project to project.

Some wireframes may be very low fidelity, where the focus is strictly the layout of content and where form and button features might appear. Other wireframes can be of great detail, at times referenced as prototypes, truly representing the interactions involved allowing team members and clients to actually see movement and interaction with form and button elements. Wireframe prototypes can also provide a hint at the design of the final website, but should not distract from understanding changes may and often times will need to be made based on issues with the interaction and/or experiences after testing. Wireframes are great for agile development and are meant to be rapidly produced and polished as you tweak with the interactions.

Integrating wireframes into your design process will provide a more stable direction into the final creative and technical end of the process, with confidence all interactions are accounted for and provide that consistency for a better user experience.

For further reading, Smashing Magazine has compiled a list of 35 Excellent Wireframing Resources to inspire you to adopt this very concept.

Planning: the challenge of complexity - Anne Benvenuto

Well it is now closing in on Q4 of 2009 and it is surprising to still think of this as a “new” idea. Anne suggests “if there’s one thing we all know about the times we are living in, it is that they are changing far faster than ever before”. That is still true today and if this is the case then why aren’t more agencies chasing these opportunities. As planners we need to be ahead of the client, ahead of the customer, and ahead of the trends. We need to set the landscape and determine where our customers are moving next.

Anne recognizes the complexity of this type of responsibility, but she also has not suggested that we work alone. She wants us to work better with our team, with our technologists and our creative team. Learn to collaborate, pull together ideas and be ahead of the curve, and as a team, succeed.

Today marks only my second day with Bridge but the boss wanted me to get a head start posting to this experience blog. I join the team, a graduate of the Digital Design discipline at the University of Cincinnati’s DAAP college, with a collection of past professional cooperative opportunities in the user-experience arena. I started off in web design and development and looked toward college to compliment those skills, fortunately what I found was exactly that; only not what I had expected at all.

Going into college I had a single talent and that was building websites. They were not the greatest websites and honestly they didn’t look very good either. However, DAAP introduced me to the right-side of my brain. In today’s work force the growing industries and explosive fields revolve around creative people, people who can connect with their clients and provide them exactly what they want. A now universal example of this is Apple and how they have reintroduced care for their users in their devices, software, and services. Experience planners live through this concept and they are committed to providing a service tuned to their clients’ needs. This is why I am here and this is exactly what I plan to do.

I have recently finished reading “A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future” by Daniel Pink, a book I highly recommend. Pink has dissected today’s business economy and argues that we are transitioning from a very left-brained society to a much more right-brained society. He does this tastefully by introducing six aptitudes as a framework for developing your skills in transition to the new model. My favorite of his six is “Empathy” and how we must live in other people’s shoes and understand and respect their needs and objectives. This book has really molded my perspective of my career and I have recognized the importance of having a multi-faceted skillset, being open to everything around me. To practice this I have started sketching and reading more, something I encourage everyone to do.