Author's E-mail: salaakso@cs.helsinki.fi

This collection consists of user interface design patterns (interaction patterns) that seems to be recurring problems when trying to make design based on the user's goals. These design patterns have been analyzed during the past five years by going through hundreds of designs, to give instructions and design examples to the students of design courses at the University of Helsinki, Dept. of Computer Science. In addition, some patterns have been crystallized in customer projects at Interacta Design Oy.

The collection does not primarily consist of GUI designs of common software, but tries to outline the recurring design problems faced when trying to create good design. The authors' method to produce good design is to use the Goal-Derived Design (GDD) method that is based on simulation of the user's goals. The pattern collection does not include all the characteristics of good design they know so far, but only the design knowledge that they have found appropriate to describe as design patterns.

The authors have not tried to apply the format of Alexander's design patterns, for example, but instead, these descriptions try to emphasize the most interesting findings of each pattern.