What are some great web based interfaces that you use on a day to day basis?

Question

I definitely appreciate a good interface and as a developer, I try to create them for my users. But appreciating a good interface and designing one are a different thing. I'm looking for good interfaces (such as IMHO StackOverflow, Gmail) as examples of good UI from which I can model my own UI's.

Answer 1

Pretty much anything by google, really. They're all very simple and to the point, focusing on usability.

Answer 2

I personally think that Netflix has an excellent web UI. Responsive, easy to navigate. Not mutch CRUD going on, but I find it very comfortable.

Answer 3

You should get yourself a copy of both Don't Make Me Think and The Non-Designer's Design Book for your base knowledge/insight.

From there, it's much easier for you to dissect and analyze the layouts you already know and like, and recreate them for your own amusement.

edit: To mitigate misunderstanding, the point I'm trying to make is that you probably don't need as many good examples of nice layouts, if you know what to look for. For example, I can be shown a thousand haute couture dresses, and I still couldn't make one myself, because I don't know what to look for.

Answer 4

My favorites

• Stack Overflow: This is a WIKI so it's not a rep point grab. I just really love the interface on this site. Been to too many crappy Q/A sites
• Google Reader
• MSDN: It's gotten a ton better in recent years and is a great way to grab little esoteric details about various APIs

Answer 5

iStockPhoto.com it's simple, effective and handles a large amount of information and data without getting bogged down. It also doesn't get in the way of the info you are looking for.

Answer 6

One of my personal favs: newspond.com

Answer 7

A good user interface fulfills a specific need of its users effectively.

As an example, here is a site (translation) that I have created for finding out what food is available in the cafeterias of the University of Helsinki. The typical use case is that when a student is hungry, he needs to know what food is available in the neighborhood student cafeterias (which are cheap for students), so that he can choose where to eat and what. He knows where each of those cafeterias is, but does not know what food they have today.

That site shows all the needed information at once. Because the students typically have a couple of cafeterias where they go, they can either bookmark the page with those cafeterias selected, or save the selection as a cookie. After that they can reach their goal without any navigation on the web site.

Answer 8

I don't use it on a day-to-day basis, but I'm very impressed with the Perseus Project digital library.

Here's a link to a poem from Catullus' Carmina in Latin as an example of the interface. Some features that I really like:

• Click on the bar near the top to jump to any poem in the work. Larger chunks of the bar represent larger sections of the work (poems, chapters, however that particular work is logically broken up by the author).
• Click on a Latin word in the poem to bring up a window (be patient; it seems to take a while) with lexicon entries, user voting and statistics on the word form (i.e. what the inflection means in the context of the sentence; it can be ambiguous in Latin) and so forth.
• There are a number of resources down the right column, including various English translations, notes, references, etc. Any of them can be either shown in the right column, or swapped out with whatever is in the main content area in the center.