Mari Sheibley, the lead designer at Foursquare, has created a resource of inspirational mobile user interfaces for the benefit of the mobile design and development community. The website, available at Mobile-Patterns.com, offers dozens of screenshots of popular mobile applications showing how they implement various UI elements like comment boxes, splash screens, lists, sign-up flows and more.
Filling a Void in the Mobile Design World
We recently discovered this resource via Twitter, but Sheibley says she launched it back in mid-February. “I’m always looking at other apps for inspiration on how things look, but more importantly how things work and interact,” Sheibley told us. “There are a lot of great pattern resources for websites, such as patterntap.com, but I couldn’t find anything quite like this for mobile.”
Sheibley also noted that while there were a lot of different design-oriented blogs, they only touch on a few things and were hard to organize. And while design websites like dribbble and forrst are great for inspiration, she found them more useful for questions like “how do I make this button look really hot and 3D?” and less for questions like “how do other apps handle EDU for their first time users?” or “how do other apps handle notification systems?”
To fill this void, she launched Mobile-Patterns.com, a site dedicated to organizing screens of various mobile applications’ user interfaces. The site was created using the collection of screenshots she has taken over the years.
Much of what’s currently featured on the new website is related to what Sheibley works on and researches for Foursquare, she says, which explains the site’s focus on activity feeds, check-in screens, user profiles and other aspects of social applications.
Recent additions to the site include sections on Settings and Sign-up Flows, while a section featuring Venue and Place Detail Pages is forthcoming, she says.
Overall, the Mobile-Patterns website is great resource for mobile designers and developers looking for inspiration and ideas on how to craft the interfaces for their own mobile applications. To stay tuned regarding future updates to the website, you can follow Mari Sheibley here on Twitter.
Update: Check the comments section for similar resources. Thanks guys!
