“User interface (UI) patterns have the potential to make software development more efficient. The prospect of such efficiency gains has led to interest in user interface (UI) patterns by individuals and organizations looking for ways to increase quality while at the same time reducing the costs associated with software development.” (Patrick Stapleton – Boxes and Arrows)

“Login functionality isn’t new. It’s not awesome. It’s not very challenging to develop. Teams are designing this functionality as if it’s never been built before. But it has been built before. Teams, all over the world, have built login functionality into their applications about a million times. And yet, here we are, doing it all over again. All this re-creation and re-invention isn’t just inefficient, it leaves the team open to problems. Because it’s not the sexy part of their project, it’s likely to get less attention, resulting in an unusable and frustrating experience. This is where the Re-use Trinity — Patterns, Components, and Interaction Design Frameworks — come in.” – (Jared Spool)

“One of the key objectives of user research is to identify themes or threads that are common across participants. These patterns help us to turn our data into insights about the underlying forces at work, influencing user behavior.” – (Steve Baty – UXmatters)

“User Experience Patterns are great, because proven and repeatable solutions help to get a head start on UI Design. Infragistics makes its new UX patterns explorer “Quince” available for free. Quince, which launched today, is an online repository of the world’s most useful and usable UX patterns. Free and open, anybody can contribute to Quince and grow the UX pattern body of knowledge.” – Silverlight required (Infragistics)

“Tools for developing user interfaces have become increasingly sophisticated and available in recent years, ranging from object-oriented application development tools such as Java Swing to WYSIWYG HTML editors such as Dreamweaver. Such tools promise more rapid development—including quicker iteration—and potentially greater reliability. While we should welcome these benefits, increasing the ease of user interface development at a technical level can—perhaps ironically—make it more difficult for UX teams to operate effectively. We must bridge the gap between the technical skills we need to implement user interfaces and the skills that let us understand users and design maximally effective user interfaces for them.” (Peter Hornsby – UXmatters)

“This browser was produced by the Interface Design Team of the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam.” – courtesy of latebytes

“This document contains a library of patterns used by sites in the Web 2.0 landscape to support the new user sign-up and ramp-up experience. By leveraging the patterns we identified across twenty applications, you’ll learn how to get users to join and participate in your network or application.” (Adaptive Path Reports)

“A sophisticated online collection of about 48 design patterns that describe distinct methods for the display of interactive information graphics, their active behavior as well as the forms of user interaction with them.” (Niceone) – courtesy of informationaesthetics

“It has long been common practice to use recurring solutions to solve common problems. Such solutions are also called design patterns. Collections of software design patterns are standard reference points for the experienced user interface designer. This website seeks to better the situation for the UI designer, who struggles with the same problems as many other UI designers have struggled with before him. UI-Patterns.com are not the first to create a UI design library. While other pattern collections are useful, they are far from coherent and complete. The purpose of this site is over time to fill some of the gaps – especially by providing code examples as to how how the different patterns can be implemented: to join theory with practice.” (Anders Toxboe) – courtesy of thaliakeren

“When you’re starting out as an information architect (IA), being part of a strong community of fellow practitioners helps immensely. A little over a year ago, on Sunday, February 22, 2006, I participated in an informal workshop on wireframing techniques that took place here in Toronto. Bryce Johnson, Director of User Experience Design at Navantis Inc., facilitated and hosted the workshop at his workplace. The knowledge sharing and the wireframing best practices that emerged from the workshop, plus the sense of community I experienced there, helped me build a foundation as an information architect and got me started on developing my own design workflow. Now, I’d like to share the techniques I’ve learned with a broader community of information architects.” (Lindsay Ellerby – UXmatters)

“Wikipatterns is not an instruction manual, it’s a set of tools. It’s examples of techniques that have helped people, and of situations that people have found themselves in that they wished they hadn’t. We want to help to identify a nail, and know you might want to hit it with a hammer.” – courtesy of elearningpost

“I must admit that I am not a fan of pattern books in general – especially in the field of design. I’ve always felt they are excellent sources of inspiration if you’re crafting a quilt or stenciling a wainscot for your living room, but for more involved design activities, I’ve concluded they are too simplistic—perhaps even limiting. I suspect this opinion was informed by my architecture professor’s intensely negative reaction to Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language and A Timeless Way of Building when they were first published. Years later, when I learned that software engineers were enamored of Alexander’s books, and the emergence of software patterns had its basis in Alexander’s notion of design patterns, I was bemused and skeptical.” (Leo Frishberg – UXmatters)

“Patterns communicate design ideas from one designer to another.” (Yahoo! User Interface Blog)

“(…) standards are created over time. Use them based on your interpretation of their ubiquity and deconstruct which aspects of the system are truly standardized and which are variations on the theme around the standard. Conventions are to be respected, but use them within contexts and realize that using conventions outside their originating contexts can be troublesome for users who are expecting too much of the convention, but that convention may not work precisely in the new context you are designing in (…). Patterns and guidelines are tools to bring organization to the overwhelming infinite possibility of solutions. Don’t get caught laying on your laurels though and forgetting that our greatest asset as designers is creative discovery towards innovation through empathy.” (David Heller – uiGarden.net)

“The idea of adding design process attributes to patterns expands the focus of patterns to include the context of design.” (Peter Boersma)

“Inside any organization, you’ve already evolved your own set of patterns and should have some way of collecting this knowledge. Knowledge management and sharing should focus not only on patterns, but also on methods for knowing when to use a particular pattern and when not to. You don’t have to create a complex Web application. Wikis and blogs are easy to set-up and maintain, and they offer a simple way to manage information about patterns.” (Austin Govella – ASIS&T Bulletin: Special Issue on Information Architecture) – courtesy of petermorville