Erwann reminded me yesterday of how nice a job the UK Government, of all places, has been doing of revamping and unifying all their websites to make a lot of complicated information really quite accessible. They even won the London Design Museum’s 2013 Design of the Year Award earlier this year.
Their design principles are well worth a look, too.
Cool to see Sun’s Web App UI Guidelines finally go public. As Chip Alexander says,:
They are a set of building blocks for web applications that have been designed by user interface specialists, thoroughly thought through and usability tested. They can be used for developing full web applications, allowing designers and developers to focus on their application’s particular needs rather than the design of all the controls and elements inside.
The corresponding Woodstock toolkit for which they were written has been available under an open source (CDDL) licence for a while, but of course the guidelines themselves can be applied to any web app. (They do have a bit of a system administration app slant, though, for obvious reasons.)