ux-patterns

Thoughts on UX patterns plus collections of such patterns and related examples.

Patterns

1. Images for everything

Humans like and respond to images, and especially faces (babies as young as few days pay more attention to images containing of human faces than other kinds of image)

Use (gr)avatars
For any object you have, try to have an image …
favicon

2. Dashboards

Dashboards are good. Every app should have a dashboard.

3. User centric structure (and urls)

 http://site.com/{user-name}/...

Examples:

twitter
github

4. Search everywhere

Get rid of browse or list and replace with search

5. Everything has a title and a ‘slug’

Everything has:

id (+name/slug) -> use it for the URL
label/title -> use it in the interface

6. Allow users to message using @{username}

This arose from Twitter (prior art?) and is now being universally adopted (at least in more techhy circles? e.g. github, trello, …)

Combined with auto-complete it’s a fast and easy way to reference and message a user.

Discussion

Modals

- only one at a time
- do not need to interfere with main page

# Other Resources

http://uxporn.uxpin.com/ - lots of screenshots
http://ui-patterns.com/explore - library of patterns plus lots of illustrative screenshots