Not like the early days of design when people explored interactive and learned how to use it, people know how to use technology through interfaces. We expect certain behaviors, functions and responses. A design pattern is a formal way of documenting a solution to a common design problem. Trends have emerged that demonstrate designs that work for different purposes. Over time collections of these observations have been gathered as interaction design patterns.

Lets face it, if tomorrow you were going to create a new email client you would just start brainstorming and sketching. You would carefully look at Gmail, Apple Mail, Outlook, and make sure you are including all the expected behavior.

I have been invited to many business requirements brainstorming meetings where the participants haven’t done research. In most cases the solution has been done many times and vendors would be glad to demonstrate their products. Perhaps they are too expensive or more than needed but it will help the problem solving be 100 times more effective. The same goes for when a UX designer solves a problem for a user to complete a task or a business owner reviews the UX designer’s solution for client acceptance. Researching design patterns gives us perspective and insight beyond our direct experience and memory.

Here are 10 great resources for design patterns. This is a great way to get ideas for all kinds of user interactions such as user registration, tabs, navigation, pagination. You name it.

1. Welie.com: Martijn van Welie has a Ph.D. in Human Computer Interaction and works as an interaction design consultant in Amsterdam. He has amassed a great collection of design patterns.
2. Little Springs Design (mobile): Mobile UI design resources, patterns and devices provided free by user experience consulting, Little Springs Design.
3. Open Source Design Patter Library (OSDPL): The Open Source Design Pattern Library is a place where individuals and organizations can share, collaborate, and discuss design patterns.
4. UI Patterns: The work of Anders Toxboe – a Danish web developer seeking to categorize what has before seemed like ad hoc approaches to developing web applications.
5. Yahoo! Design Pattern Library: A great resource for design practices, just added a collection of Reputation patterns to their growing collection of social design patterns.
6. UI Design Factory: UI Pattern Factory is a mix of user interface design pattern library and UI gallery.
7. Tom Ericksons Design Patterns: An interaction designer and researcher in the Social Computing Group at IBM’s Watson Labs Tom Erickson has a valuable collection of design patterns and other content.
8. KONIGI: Konigi is a community for user experience designers with great design examples.
9. Pattern Tap: Another UX community with a great collection of examples and inspiration.
10. Boxes and Arrows (interview): Will Evans, founder and Principal User Experience Architect for Semantic Foundry, interviews Erin Malone, Christian Crumlish, and Lucas Pettinati to talk about design patterns, pattern libraries, styleguides, and innovation. Erin, Christian, and Lucas are leading a workshop on design patterns at this year’s Interactions in Vancouver; and, Erin and Christian are writing a book on patterns for designing social spaces for O’Reilly.

There are many more resources out there. Would would love to hear any tips and comments.