O’Reilly: Inside RIA

I've been involved in web development for about 12 years now and have always been involved in the early stages and client facing aspects of the development cycle. More often than not I turned to very low-fi methods of sketching the early versions of a UI such as paper, whiteboard or Powerpoint. None of these are ideal and the early agreed upon designs seem to get lost along the way. Also it's hard to make changes to non digital mockups. Recently I've been playing around with with Balsamiq Mockups which seems to be a great quick and dirty design tool for developers, designers and those who aren't tech savvy at all.

I stumbled upon a new pattern library via, Information Design Patterns this week Nick Bouton's bookmarks. It's got some really neat patterns especially for anyone doing search or data visualization in RIAs. Let's add this to list of pattern resources I blogged about a while back.

The "Bad Usability Calendar" reminded me that it's just as important to look at mistakes as it is best practices. Here's a couple resources you and your team can use immediately to avoid common user interface pitfalls.

As we go hurling down the road of RIA innovation it's nice to have some guidelines and tools to help us create better user experiences. I think user interface design patterns should in everyone's toolbox. They help us come up with new ideas for our UIs, it helps us communicate inside and outside of our team and finally it helps us to avoid common pitfalls.