Designing a good interface, good means the degree of usability, requires knowledge of design rules and experience with interactions. Patterns can also be used to document and share existing design knowledge. Design pattern libraries are good because they capture the most important aspects of the problem and offer a solution approach. The structure of the pattern is scalable and can be applied to other and broader problems. The interest in creating patterns and creating a pattern language for user interface design was already present in 1994. (Rijken 1994, Bayle 1998). Several different approaches to building model libraries were made by different people around the turn of the millennium. (Mahemoff and Johnston 1998). Mahemoff proposes the following categories: task related patterns, user related patterns, user interface element patterns and system-based patterns. Common Ground (Tidwell 1998) or the Web patterns collection (Perzel and Kane 1999), Martijn van Welie/Hallvard Trætteberg (2000). But in 2000 there was still none that had become established. The reason is that there was no agreement on a format and focus.
With the introduction of the iPhone in 2007 and the hype that followed, it became necessary to design software and its interface for mass use on these devices. Erik Nilsson presented a pattern library for mobile patterns in 2008. He drew his insights from the problems encountered during the development of the projects UMBRA (UMBRA is a graphics software technology company founded 2007 in Helsinki, Finland. Umbra specializes in occlusion culling, visibility solution technology and provides middleware for video games running on Windows, Linux, iOS, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Wii U, handheld consoles, and other platforms. In 2021, Amazon acquired Umbra. Information copied from Wikipedia) and FLAMINCO (web pattern library from Nilsson!? – no information found) appeared.
He refers to three main challenges that the small touch screen poses. He has classified these as the three main problem areas.
- use of screen space.
- interaction mechanisms.
- design as a whole.
Each pattern is divided into one of these 3 problem areas, within these problem areas there are smaller units of problem areas. This division into problem areas helps to concentrate on individual aspects of a larger problem. It becomes difficult when the collection grows. It needs a good problem structure to find matching patterns. The connection between problem and solution was a challenge because there is always more than one solution to a problem and the solution can always be applied to several problems. This results in either a lot of repetitions or a lot of cross-references, which affects the readability of the pattern collection.
- Main problem area
- Problem area
- Description and individual problems (with connected UI design patterns)
He also thinks separately about UI components such as buttons, tabs, scrollbars etc. and their adaptation to touch interaction. The patterns collection was presented by Erik Nilsson at the HCI International conference in 2007 and at the IASTED HCI conference in 2008. [1]
Pattern collections:
In 2008 there were a few pattern collections, including some on Mobile UI design patterns.
- The Design Pattern Wiki
- Little Springs mobile UI design patterns
- Flaminco – http://www.flaminco.net
Some of them had design patterns that were more for universal interfaces and had a higher level of abstraction.
1 http://www.developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/.
2 http://www.designinginterfaces.com/.
3 http://www.visi.com/~snowfall/InteractionPatterns.html.
4 http://www.welie.com/patterns/.
5 http://www.deyalexander.com/resources/design-patterns.html.
6 http://www.gibbert.net/DPWiki (in German).
7 http://www.patterns.littlespringsdesign.com/~newlsdpatterns/index.php/Main_Page
8 https://www.welie.com/patterns/index.php
M.V. Welie created his own website as early as 1999, the new website was created in 2008 as well as a Hall of Shame website, which is still online today. http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/new.html / http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/errormsg.htm [2]
Jenifer Tidwell created her website in 1999. According to the information on the website, there should be a new website, but the new website does not show much content.
- https://www.mit.edu/~jtidwell/common_ground.html
- http://designinginterfaces.com/
[1]Design patterns for user interface for mobile applications, Erik G. Nilsson, 2008 in: Advances in Engineering Software 40 (2009) 1318–1328
[2] M.V. Welie, “The Amsterdam Collection of Patterns in User Interface Design,” 1999. http://www.cs.vu.nl/~martijn/patterns/index.html
