Quince is a “UX Patterns Explorer” created by prolific component vendor Infragistics. It allows you to explore and annotate a wealth of patterns that are commonly (or not-so-commonly) used for building user interfaces. (An Infragistics blog comments on why they believe these should be labeled UX patterns rather than UI patterns).
'Quince' UX Pattern Explorer
Of course, just as with Object-Oriented Design Patterns, there’s a huge gap between knowing these patterns by (some arbitrary) name, and knowing what to do with them. Quince allows you to explore related patterns, but the quality of insight that Quince can offer a developer-designer faced with a UX challenge remains to be seen.
There’s an RSS feed you can subscribe to if you want to be informed when new patterns get added. “Deep Links” in the RSS feed launch you straight back into Quince presenting a particular example or pattern, which is one of the features that makes Quince itself a slick demo of a Silverlight 2 RIA.
Here’s a bit on how they built it. I’m guessing they used a few Infragistics controls in the process:)
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Posted Feb 13th, 2009
into Designer, Developer, Microsoft, Silverlight, Visualization
with tags infragistics, quince
Hi Rob,
Thanks for the review.
Regarding the gap you mention. That’s why patterns have the various parts to them beyond just a problem-solution statement (namely, the context, rationale, implementation, and examples). These help you know when to use them, why they work, and provide guidelines and examples for how to make them work. Designers and devs get paid the big bucks
because they use their magnificent intellects to put these things together and make something real that hopefully is usable, useful, and desirable for the people they are building for.
–Ambrose
Ambrose, thanks for the note. The more I think about it, the less I am convinced that the patterns, at least as they exist on Quince today, are somehow “elemental.” But to the extent that Quince facilitates a wiki-like community discussion about what constitutes a “UX Pattern,” I think it’s a useful and interesting tool.