Improving the Search for User Interface Design Patterns through Typed Relationships

Despite being a set of proven, well-documented, contextualized recommendations for solving frequently occurring user interface design problems, user interface design patterns are still not widely used. We believe this is due to the lack of tools to help designers find patterns and identify how they can be combined to solve user interface design problems. This paper proposes to classify and make explicit the relationships between user interface design patterns. We conducted a small-scale study that indicated that this proposal is more efficient and better accepted by the participants than browsing through a user interface design library.