CUIP

Conceptual User Interface Patterns

This place is dedicated to Conceptual User Interface Patterns.

Think in these patterns as abstract building-blocks easy to plug and connect to compound complex UI for the domain of information systems and business applications.

They are User Interface Patterns because their main concern is user interaction.
At the same time, they are also Conceptual Patterns as opposed to Design Patterns due to they are more abstract in the way they are near to the domain model than to the user interface, keeping design concerns and platform choices to be done in later phases.

They were gathered and distilled during a research work in User Interface modeling for business applications during more than nine years. The collection can be used as a language to model multichannel User Interfaces for business applications and optionally, to generate code from such model to obtain a full running prototype or implementation.

For the sake of understandability the patterns are arranged in three levels:

User access
Level 1 organizes the commands available in the user interface for the user. These commands can be arranged in a hierarchical way based on information architecture techniques. In any case, the commands derive from the user task and requirements. This level defines the initial navigation in the system to the functionality (e.g. think in an application or web menu).
Interaction Units
Level 2 contains the interaction units. Each interaction units provides an scenario for user interaction (CHI in the strict sense: Computer-Human Interaction). (e.g. forms, web pages, but also a stage in a automated call center).
Elemental Patterns
Level 3 provides the patterns applicable to interaction units to constrain their behavior.

The full index of patterns follows:

Last update: February 18^th, 2007. Change's log.