Links on Interaction Design

OK–Cancel or Cancel–OK? & OK and Cancel Buttons- What’s the Right Order?

OK–Cancel or Cancel–OK?

By Jakob Nielsen

Summary
Should the OK button come before or after the Cancel button? Following platform conventions is more important than suboptimizing an individual dialog box

OK–Cancel or Cancel–OK?

OK and Cancel Buttons- What’s the Right Order?

By Tom Tullis

Takeaways

  1. Avoid using grouped buttons labelled as “OK” and “Cancel” on the web. There’s too great a chance that your users may have a different expectation from yours about which button is which. If they’re in a hurry, they might accidentally choose the wrong button.
  2. It’s probably better to use buttons that are visually separated.
  3. With the buttons visually separated, putting the action to continue (e.g., OK, Save, Submit, etc) on the right is more likely to match your users’ expectations.

OK and Cancel Buttons- What’s the Right Order?

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Interfaces Magazine

Interfaces is a quarterly magazine with features, events, reviews and jobs. Interfaces is available in print for members and as downloads for everyone else.

Interfaces Magazine

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The 10 Laws of Simplicity

John Maeda wrote a very nice book entitled The Laws of Simplicity which was published in 2006. The book is about his thoughts on simplicity. In the course of 100-pages, he outlines the ten Laws that are:

Law 1: Reduce
The Simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction
Law 2: Organize
Organization makes a system of many appear fewer
Law 3: Time
Savings in time feel like simplicity
Law 4: Learn
Knowledge makes everything simpler
Law 5: Differences
Simplicity and complexity need each other
Law 6: Context
What lies in the periphery of simplicity is definitely not peripheral
Law 7: Emotion
More emotions are better than less
Law 8: Trust
In simplicity we trust
Law 9: Failure
Some things can never be made simple
Law 10: The One
Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful

Read more about the laws o simplicity at The Laws of Simplicity website

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Web Application Design Patterns by Pawan Vora

Book cover for Web Application Design Patterns by Pawan Vora- a book for interaction designers

Title & Author

Web Application Design Patterns by Pawan Vora

Description

Ever notice that in spite of their pervasiveness, designing web applications is still challenging? While their benefits motivate their creation, there are no well-established guidelines for design. This often results in inconsistent behaviors and appearances, even among web applications created by the same company. Design patterns for web applications, similar in concept to those for web sites and software design, offer an effective solution.

In Web Application Design Patterns, Pawan Vora documents design patterns for web applications by not only identifying design solutions for user interaction problems, but also by examining the rationale for their effectiveness, and by presenting how they should be applied.

Audience

User interface designers, usability professionals, application developers working on commercial or intranet type products, and product management and project management.

Reviews

This is the type of book you’ll want to read with your entire team and a flip chart, because every page will produce a list of actionable changes to the applications you’re developing. Pawan Vora has produced an amazing catalogue ofthe essential patterns for designing today’s
web-based applications.

Jared Spool, Founding Principal, User Interface Engineering

Web Application Design Patterns is a must read if you are in the business of designing web applications, or simply want to understand the elements of a well-designed web application. Pawan Vora has condensed best practice, along with research and his solid experience, to create a useful reference about designing web applications. Even if you skimmed the book and looked at the designs, it will spark creative design ideas.

David Dick, Technical Writer

Publisher

Morgan Kaufmann (March 13, 2009)

ISBN

ISBN-10: 012374265X
ISBN-13: 978-0123742650

Purchase

At Elsevier

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The Elements of a Design Pattern

A quality library means team members have the information they need at their fingertips. Choosing usable components that work smoothly for users becomes the developer’s path of least resistance.

It takes a push from the library creators, but once it’s completed, the value seems to be immediate: teams can start to discuss what works and what doesn’t in current designs, laying out a vision for future development.

What do teams put into their design pattern descriptions?

  1. Pattern Name
  2. Description
  3. Context of Use
  4. Where to Use it
  5. How it Works (with visual aid)
  6. Specifications
  7. Related Patterns
  8. Competitive Approaches
  9. Source Code (quite rare)
  10. Usability Research
  11. Discussion

The Elements of a Design Pattern

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A list of Design Pattern Resources/ Websites

Get your pattern resource added (or suggest one)

If you want to get a pattern resource added to the list below, send in the name of the website using the submission form. If it is good, you should see it added within in a day of your submission.

Design Pattern Resources

  1. Patterns in Interaction Design at Welie
  2. Yahoo! Design Pattern Library
  3. Pattern Browser- Interface Design Patterns
  4. Search Patterns (flickr), Search Patterns site
  5. HCI Patterns
  6. UI Patterns
  7. Designing Interaces
  8. Mobile UI design patterns
  9. Ajax Patterns
  10. Info Design Patterns
  11. Designing Social Interfaces
  12. Infragistics Quince: UX Patterns Explorer
  13. Pattern Tap
  14. Wiki Patterns
  15. Cross-cultural Collaboration
  16. UI Pattern Factory
  17. Mobile design pattern gallery
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Mega Drop-Down Navigation Menus Work Well

Summary:
Big, two-dimensional drop-down panels group navigation options to eliminate scrolling and use typography, icons, and tooltips to explain the user’s choices.

Mega Drop-Down Navigation Menus Work Well

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Yahoo! Design Stencils for wireframing (Axure, Illustrator, Omnigraffle, Photoshop, Visio)

Yahoo! Design Stencil kit for Illustrator, Omingraffle, Photoshop and Visio

Yahoo! Design Stencil Kit version 1.0 is available for OmniGraffle, Visio (XML), Adobe Illustrator (PDF and SVG), and Adobe Photoshop (PNG), and covers the following topics:
Ad Units, calendars, carousels, charts and tables, UI controls, form elements, grids, menus and buttons, bobile - general, mobile - iPhone, navigation and pagination, OS elements, placeholder text, screen resolutions, tabs and windows and containers.

Download a Yahoo! Stencil Kit

Yahoo! Design Stencil kit for Axure

Axure went ahead to created the above widgets themselves so you’re in luck if you’re using Axure.

Axure RP Custom Widget Libraries - Yahoo! Design Stencils Kit

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Mozilla Firefox Omnigraffle UI stencils

Most of the Firefox mockups are created using OmniGraffle. If you don’t have OmniGraffle, or are on a different platform, you can still download the stencil images and use any image editor to create your mockup.

Mozilla Firefox Omnigraffle UI stencils

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Implementing a Pattern Library in the Real World: A Yahoo! Case Study

Yahoo! designed and built a repository for interaction design patterns, created a process for submitting and reviewing the content, and seeded the resulting library with a set of sample patterns. They organized the content to make it findable, structured the content so it was predictable, and tested and iterated the design of the user interface of the tool to make it usable.

Throughout this process, they introduced incentives for participation for both the contributors and management to encourage submissions and support.

Implementing a Pattern Library in the Real World: A Yahoo! Case Study.

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