Thinking

4 Best User Interface Design Pattern Libraries

Sometimes designers need inspiration when they’re designing a user interface. User interface pattern libraries can give us different ideas we never thought of before. After sifting through dozens of them, these four offer the best examples with an easy to use navigation. If you’re designing a mobile app, check out the best mobile pattern libraries.

elements-of-designElements of Design

pattern-tapPattern Tap

patternryPatternry

ui-patternsUI Patterns


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This Post Has 20 Comments

  1. Josh L Reply

    My personal favorite is the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library:

    http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/

    The explanations for each pattern are extremely detailed and often include examples of how Yahoo! uses these patterns in their own products.

    • anthony Reply

      I like that one too, but I didn’t include it because it only provides one example for each pattern. The ones on the list provide several, so you get a better idea of the different variations.

  2. Matt Reply

    Nice round up, thanks for this! It’s good to see options besides yui.

  3. WC Reply

    Last link is relative and not absolute. It doesn’t go where you want it to.

  4. J-P Reply

    (Psst: your link for the UI patterns logo is bust – it goes to an internal uxmovement.com page rather than ui-patterns.com)

  5. Steffen Reply

    The UI-Patterns link is broken. Should be

    http://ui-patterns.com/

    🙂

  6. Cristi Reply

    Hey Anthony,

    Just wanted to tell you that the link on UI Patterns logo is not correctly pointing to the site.

    Other than that, kudos for your work on this site!

  7. Moon Reply

    Hey these are good resources for the designers/webmasters. Please look at our site and respond here, how does the web design looks?

    here is it: http://www.reginout.com

  8. Sarah E. Welch Reply

    Any good design pattern sites for desktop applications?

    • anthony Reply

      Hey Sarah. I posted a collection of UI Guidelines for Desktop and Mobile Applications. Check it out.

  9. Christian Watson Reply

    Thanks for the mention! I created my site to fill a need when working with designers on my team — I could have something to refer to when I needed to provide direction or give feedback.

    It also helps when I am wireframing a new website feature. In fact, most of the categories have come about because I knew that I was going to need reference material for something we were designing at work.

    I’m glad others have found it useful. I also wanted to make it super easy to navigate, with a minimum of clicking.

    • anthony Reply

      No problem. You have a good site on your hands. Thanks for contributing to the community.

  10. Kwayzi Reply

    What of Welie.com?

  11. Bruce Reply

    Actually, Manu’s are good ones too, perhaps not as robust. I like the spirit of your research here. We all need to remember that patterns should be used in the right context of your work. Most work that we do (in my experience) actually produce custom patterns which combine several patterns or use a different method to address a specific biz/user need. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen a yahoo pattern thrown into a wireframe only to realize that the pattern doesn’t match the expectation of the users. Yahoo patterns are what Yahoo standardizes to. While they might work for “pagination” – it might not be the method that your users expect or require.

    I use Pattern Tap to help inspire my designers to “think” – sometimes designers translate too literally from a wireframe and lose the creative details that wires might lack. Their alpha is especially nice- just wish they’d add some level of detail on how patterns [are meant to] address needs. Thanks for writing.

  12. Daniel Rose Reply

    For UI patterns (focused on desktop), I find Quince by Infragistics a great resource: http://quince.infragistics.com/

  13. Praveesh Reply

    Thanks a lot for sharing 🙂

  14. Sergey Pakhandrin Reply

    I’ve started a new service http://inspired-ui.com. It’s a collection of great mobile UI patterns. Daily updates, daily inspiration! Check it out guys!

  15. Hai Tran Reply

    Nice article. It’s very old here but still work fine. I’m looking for information about UI/UX and I just dropped by your blog and this might be one of the places I will come frequently. Thanks a lot

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