You are here: Home > Literature and sites > Interaction Design patterns literature
Websites
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Amsterdam Collection of Interaction Design Patterns by Martijn van Welie.
Quite extensive, by far the most useful online pattern collection on Interaction Design.
Books
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The design of sites : patterns, principles, and processes for crafting a customer-centered Web experience by Douglas K. Van Duyne, James Landay, Jason I. Hong (2002) - Must read book, essential for all interaction designers.
- A pattern approach to Interaction Design by Jan Borchers (2001)
Books (not recommended)
Articles
Articles (not recommended)
- Experiences - A Pattern Language for User Interface Design
by Todd Coram and Jim Lee.
Somewhat older article. Attempt to create a pattern language, but quite incomplete. They have a too generic approach to patterns, and end up with obscure pattern names, like "Garden of Windows", "Zen Garden", "Goal Oriented Areas".
Exemplifying is the problem/solution pair of the pattern "Visual Symbols":
Problem: The visual display of data is the most efficient way to communicate information. However, you must not overwhelm the user with useless data or misleading metaphors.
Solution:
Design the interface based on visual cues that are recognizable and understandable by the target audience. Determine if standard symbols (e.g. ISO or IEEE symbols) exist before creating your own. Examine existing applications in the same problem domain. Resist being overly clever and keep your metaphors simple. - Patterns for Designing Navigable Information Spaces (PDF)
by Gustavo Rossi, Daniel Schwabe, Fernando Lyardet (1998)
Article that descibes 5 patterns that are published in "Pattern systems for hypermedia" by Garrido, Rossi and Schwabe. Peculiar approach to interaction design patterns: these use the language of the GOF patterns the language of the programmer - but not to great success: the problems and solutions remain technical and low-level:
A naive object-oriented designer will follow closely main O-O definitions by locating the state, structure and behavior of one domain object into the same application object. He would never separate state or structure (as in the State or Bridge design patterns), nor would he allocate behaviors in different classes (as in the Strategy or Command patterns).
Things are made more difficult than they are. One wonders for whom these patterns are written. Take for instance the pattern Active Reference (that is in fact the Breadcrumb in web design):
Solution:
A good solution is to maintain an active and perceivable navigational object acting as an index for other navigational objects (either nodes or sub-indexes). This object remains perceivable together with target objects, letting the user either explore those objects or select another related target. In this way, we will be able to interact with both the index and the target nodes. Note that we are slightly changing the usual navigation style in hypermedia (Web) applications in which when we depart from a node (or index) it is closed and we can only return to it by backtracking from the current one.

