UI Patterns and Techniques: Introduction

*** This web site is becoming a book! “Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design” will be published by O’Reilly Media in late 2005. Stay tuned for news and more web site changes… (May 27, 2005) ***

If you’ve done any Web or UI design, or even thought about it much, you should say, “Oh, right, I know what that is” to most of these patterns. But a few of them might be new to you, and some of the familiar ones may not be part of your usual design repertoire.

Each of these patterns (which are more general) and techniques (more specific) are intended to help you solve design problems. They’re common problems, and there’s no point in reinventing the wheel every time you need, say, a sortable table — plenty of folks have already done it, and learned how to do it well. Some of that knowledge is written up here, in an easily-digestible format.