Design Guidelines and Patterns
One of our goals at Peak Usability is to increase awareness and adoption of good usability and user centred design practices. The following is a list of sites and articles we hope you will find useful.
| Title | Author / Company | Comment |
|---|---|---|
| Ten recommended heuristics | Jakob Nielsen | Provides an overview of ten heuristics that are widely used. |
| Research based guidelines on Web Design and Usability Issues | National Cancer Institute (US) | Very useful and a great style guide example as well. |
| Evolution Trumps Usability Guidelines | Jared Spool | Outlines why heuristics or guidelines are just that - "guidelines" (not rules). Highlights the importance of still testing your site. |
| Global Expectations of Users' Mental Models for E-Commerce Web Layouts | Michael Bernard & Ashwin Sheshadri | Outlines where users expect to find common objects such as 'Search'. |
| Paper prototyping | Usability net | Good overview about paper prototyping. |
| First Principles from Bruce Tognazzini | Nielsen Norman Group | Principles fundamental to the architecture and implementation of effective interfaces, whether for traditional GUI environments or the web. |
| Design Pattern Library | Yahoo | Patterns describes an optimal solution to a common problem within a specific context. |
| Welie.com: Web Design Patterns | Martijn van Welie | Welie has tried to capture every bit of good design he has encountered. Also includes GUI and MobileUI design patterns. |
| Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design | Jenifer Tidwell | This site contains excerpts and patterns from her Designing Interfaces book which we highly recommend. |
| Design Patterns | Brian Christiansen | This collection captures findings of consistent, unique or interesting interfaces and design flows from across the web. |
| User Interface Design Patterns | Anders Toxboe - UI-Patterns.com | 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. The purpose of this site is over time to fill some of the gaps - especially by providing code examples as to how the different patterns can be implemented: to join theory with practice. |
| Web Application Guidelines | Sun Microsystems | Created by a set of user interface designers, usability specialists, and visual designers, at Sun for the purpose of outlining a look and feel for web applications that could be used consistently across multiple products and systems. |
| JAVA - Look and Feel Design Guidelines | Sun Microsystems | Guidelines for creating a consistent look and feel for JAVA programs across multiple operating platforms. |