Re: User Interface Design Standards

[Stuart Burnfield <sburnf -at- au1 -dot- ibm -dot- com>]

Hi Lisa -

It would be easier if you needed guidelines for GUI applications for a
particular OS, because these are already available (e.g. MS has published
guidelines for Windows applications, there's the Apple HIG for Mac
applications, CDE and OpenLook guidelines for UNIX, and so on).

Web applications haven't had the benefit of 10-20 years of shared
development history or the unifying influence of a pushy vendor, but there
do seem to be some useful resources out there:

http://www.lukew.com/resources/links_webapps.html

http://www.ibm.com/ibm/easy/eou_ext.nsf/publish/558 (see especially under
the Design link)

Ideally you will specify a few layers of relevant standards. For example,
you might tell designers to consult, in order:
1. a very short document listing your organisation's in-house standards
2. the Microsoft Web-Application Interface guidelines
3. the general Windows UI design guidelines

(I'm not saying you need to take MS's word as law--this is just an
example.)

Three weeks isn't much time! You'll probably have to start with a bare
handful of in-house guidelines, and expect to add more gradually as issues
arise during design.

Here's a fantastic portal for usability testing and UI design resources,
alas no longer being actively maintained:
http://usableweb.com/

See http://usableweb.com/about/ for links to other, more up-to-date,
usability resources.

Good luck.

Stuart

"Lisa Romie" wrote on 25/02/2006 01:49:20 AM:
> Stuart asked:
> "Desktop GUI applications? Plug-ins? Web applications? Web sites?
> >Windows? Mac? UNIX/Linux? Java? Other?"
>
> Web apps mostly.
>
> I am going to a 3 day course called The Science and Art of Effective Web
and
> Application Design offered by Human Factors International. Does anyone
know
> anything about this organization?
>
> > > I (along with a few others in my org) have 3 weeks to
> > > come up with user interface design standards.
> > > We've been doing some research, but would like to see
> > > an example of someone's real-life, documented standards.


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