For anyone ever tasked with user interface and step-through design, this is an absolute gold mine. (For anyone else, I have no doubt it’s incredibly dull. Sorry about that.) It’s a categorised collection of UI screen captures, from logins and alert messages to 404s and permissions forms - all the stuff we routinely design all over again, with varying results.

It’s the Flickrwank* of Brian Christiansen, who explains this repository by way of an oft-repeated conversation in his office:

Hey, did you see the new Staples.com homepage?

Yeah, I did. I noticed that they created a top-level tab labeled ‘Ink & Toner’.

Interesting, huh?

Yeah.

And for anyone who has ever lead a client through the UI process, that’s all he needs to say. For anyone who hasn’t, it means that people buy a ton of ink and toner online; that Staples shifts a lot of it; and that search metrics and user testing showed visitors were struggling through tiers of categories and complex searches to find this core product before the re-design.

But you don’t care. All you care about is that you can find ink and toner really, really easily at Staples.

*Not pejorative.