Design patterns for user interfaces

This work reports on 23 third year student' s projects in which the user interfaces (UI) were found wanting. We show in which ways we regard the UI to be in error. However, an examination of the available literature on UI design indicates that advice needed to correct these errors simply was not accessible. It goes on to describe what is different about design patterns and why this approach is a promising direction to pursue for UI design. Finally it presents a single pattern which would correct the kind of problems our student designers experienced