king talk

Every good designer has known that an applications or websites success many times rely on how well designed the User Interface may be. We as designers, should do what works best for us and our users. The dzineblog published a great resource for Interface Designers. Below you will find a optimized version of a different excellent User Interface resources that will allow you to access, redefine, and create a well designed UI. You should use these resources first as inspiration, and second as somewhat of a guide as to what your users may need when they come face to face with your UI.

1. Interface Design Libraries:
MephoBox
UI-Patterns
Yahoo Design Pattern Library
Pattern Tap
Pattern App
Icon Finder

2. Interface Design Blogs:
UX Mag
UX Booth
Designing Interfaces
UXmatters
inspire UX
Usability Post
Boxes and Arrows
Signal vs Noise
Konigi
Usable Web

3. Interface Design Inspiration
atebits
made by giant
Icon Dock
Versions App
Pure Volume
Threadless Typetees
Silicon Prairie
css edit
Pallian Creative

4. Interfaces for Web Apps
Subernova
Copper Project
Typetester
PXtoEM
Let‘s Freckle
Twitter
Adobe Kuler
Crazyegg
Google Analytics
LaterThis

… was the topic of the free informative event held by Microsoft Germany at the department of Informatics at TU Munich. They wrote in their invitation that Microsofts wants to talk about the influence of a better user experience and how they want to improve it in the near future. It sounded good, so I signed in with low expectations, because i couldn´t imagine that they had something completely new popping out of their sleeves. The best talk of this event was held by Peter Kirchner (Program Manager ISV). He was talking about »modern user interfaces« and tried to push the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) which includes Visual Studio and Expression (Microsofts answer to Adobes Creative Suite).

Peter said something like… »In the 80´s there was the revolution of the desktop metaphor and the graphical user interface. Later the internet was getting more popular and is now still known as the web 2.0. The next challenge will be the development of more natural user interfaces and new ways of interacting with a device or application … In the future we will see more intuitive and easier to use applications. If you want to know what Microsofts new user experience will be, just look at the Surface table. The way like virtuality and reality is merging and how simple and direct the user can navigate are just some examples … If we compare Windows graphics with the work of game developers and how they forced the graphical performance to the maximum for visualizing rich graphics, we recognized that our graphics didn´t utilize the power of modern computers until now.«

Hmmm, what do you think about it?