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Two Noteworthy UX Design Resources
October 3rd, 2008
From Human Factors Engineering, to User Interface Design, then to User Experience design, this field has experienced tremendous growth in the past 25 to 30 years. We as professionals in the field also have developed a lot of methods and patterns to help us adapt to the rapidly evolving technological innovations and user needs. I’ve recently come across two useful UX design resources. I thought to point them out so we can all take advantage of them without having to reinvent the wheel every time.
I. Yahoo! Design Pattern Library
The Yahoo! Design Pattern Library is briefly mentioned in Rob’s post on Professional Frontend Engineering. These are design stencils you can download to create wireframes for different businesses. To make things even easier, the design patterns are downloadable for OmniGraffle, Visio, and a few other formats. I downloaded the library for Visio and found it pretty handy. It is great when you need to create a wireframe quickly with common interactive components or when you want to set up a foundation for more sophisticated design.
Below is what the carousel stencil for Visio looks like:
Here is the iPhone stencil that includes main variations of the touch screen:
II. Wroblewski’s Web Form Design Book
The Rosenfeld Media website has a fairly good introduction on this book (http://www.rosenfeldmedia.com/books/webforms/ ). Given the ubiquitous spread of forms in both applications (desktop or web) and websites these days, this book really offers great help for IAs and designers to create easy to use forms with examples covering use cases from simple to complex. All the book illustrations are available on Flickr, which is a great alternative for people who absorb information via pictures!
Cathy Lu
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