Infragistics, who make User Interface controls for Windows Forms, WPF, Silverlight and ASP.NET applications, have just introduced a new web site called Quince.

Quince is a community tool that lets you explore and contribute to a growing library of UI Design Patterns – ways of designing a user interface to make it easier to use. Each pattern relates to a little piece of UI functionality, such as data validation, modal dialogs, filtering, etc and explains, with examples from real-world applications, when you might use that pattern and how you might implement it.

Users can contribute by adding text to say how they think the pattern might be changed or improved, adding extra examples or simply voting to say “I use this” so future users can see which patterns are popular.

You can explore the patterns in many ways, from an outline form where patterns are listed in-place or by tag relations which groups and connects patterns together to show how the patterns relate to one another. There are even RSS feeds so you can get alerts to newly entered patterns or comments.

If you’re thinking of designing an application, a quick browse round Quince may give you some good ideas for the user interface. If you’ve encountered problems with the usability of an application you designed, Quince may be able to suggest some simple changes to overcome the difficulties.

Anyone who has a passing interest in UI design should definitely look in on Quince. It is a fresh, modern UI design in itself and has potential to grow into an indispensible tool for UI designers and programmers from hobbyists to the big corporate players.